Praise for "A fascinating, important book about what 1II.t!
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good and bad people bad, and how good pl ()III(
themselves from those others."
the
th sociopa
next
door
The Ruthless Versus the Re st of Us
Martha Sto ut , Ph .D
B R O ADWAY BO O K S
N E W YO R K
�
BROADWAY
THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR.
Copyright © 2005 by
Martha Stout. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. PRIN TED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BROADWAY BOOKS
and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal.
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Book design by Ellen Cipriano ISBN 0-7394-5674-1
For Steve Stout, my brother and the person I think of first when I think of strength of character
The conscience of a people is their power. -John Dryden
contents
Acknowledgments / xi Author's Note
/ xiii
Introduction: Imagine /
ONE
The Seventh Sense /
1
19
TWO
Ice People: The Sociopaths / 36
THR
When Normal Conscience Sleeps / 52
FOUR
The Nicest Person in the World / 70
FIV
Why Conscience Is Partially Blind / 86
SIX
How to Recognize the Remorseless /
103
r
SEV
The Etiology of Guiltlessness:
What Causes Sociopathy? /
EI G H T
The Sociopath Next Door /
NIN
120
140
The Origins of Conscience /
164
TEN
Bernie's Choice: Why Conscience Is Better /
ELEqr
I
181
Groundhog Day /
197
TWELV E
Conscience in Its Purest Form:
Science Votes for Morality / 209
Notes / 2 1 9 Index / 233
acknowledgments
Much of the time, the absorbing task of writing a book feels less like authoring and more like channeling, through your fingers and a key board, the lessons and inspiration of countless other people, wise friends known over many years and teachers disguised as students, patients, and colleagues. I wish I could go back in time and thank them all, and I take delight in this chance to thank the people who most helped and supported me during the year I wrote The Sociopath
Next Door. For her commentary and utter indispensability, and her patience, I thank my friend and colleague Carol Kauffman, she of the legendary creativity at solving problems, whose generosity never skipped a beat, even though she was in the middle of writing Pivot Points. Because none of this would have been possible without her mov ing commitment to her mission, and for her having been always a deep well of grace, comprehension, and heart in a wide desert, I thank my agent and treasured friend, Susan Lee Cohen. If I had attempted to design the world's most superb editor, I could not have done nearly so well as Kristine Puopolo at Broadway Books, and I thank her for her intelligence, her precision, and her ex traordinary ability to be quietly right, always, without ever being in trusive. I thank Diane Wemyss for her caring and her organizing, and for having suggested one of the events I write about, and Elizabeth Haymaker for her charm across the miles.
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XI
A C K N OWL E DG M E N T S
I thank Steve Stout and Darcy Wakefield, for making me believe in love again. Once again-and always-I thank my remarkable parents, Eva Deaton Stout and Adrian Phillip Stout, for showing me just how much love and light two people of surpassing conscience can bring to the world. And with awe, and more love than I could have imagined before I knew her, I would like to thank my daughter, Amanda, my first reader and my most insightful one. She has taught me, among so many other things, that kindness and integrity come with the soul.
xii
author's note
The descriptions in The Sociopath Next Door do not identify individ uals. At the very heart of psychotherapy is the precept of confiden tiality, and as usual I have taken the most exacting measures to preserve the privacy of all real persons. All names are fictitious, and all other recognizable features have been changed. Some individuals who appear in the book willingly gave their consent to be anony mously portrayed. In these cases, no information has been included that might in any way identify them. The story in the chapter entitled "Groundhog Day" is fiction. Otherwise, the people, events, and conversations presented here are taken from my twenty-five-year practice of psychology. However, be cause of my commitment to confidentiality, the people and circum stances portrayed in these pages are composite in nature; that is to say, each case represents a great many individuals whose character istics and experiences have been adopted conceptually, carefully altered in their specifics, and combined to form an illustrative char acter. Any resemblance of such a composite character to any actual person is entirely coincidental.
xiii
INTR ODUCTI ON
ImagIne .
.
Minds differ still more than faces. -Voltaire
magine-if you can-not having a conscience, none at all, no feel
I ings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense
of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibil ity is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological. makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply as sumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal ex perience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.
M ART H A ST O U T
In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world. You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered. How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other peo ple (conscience)? The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people whether they have a conscience or not-favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent peo ple and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pur sue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking, or international develop ment, or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual moral or legal incumbrances. When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with
2
T H E S O C I O PATH N E XT D O O R
the exquisite freedom that results from having no conscience what soever. You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful. Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all. Or no--let us say you are not quite such a person. You are am bitious, yes, and in the name of success you are willing to do all man ner of things that people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an intellectually gifted individual. Your intelligence is above average perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart. But you know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal, or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly dream about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious of the people around you. As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers of people. These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically aggravated at not hav ing more. It chafes to be so free of the ridiculous inner voice that in hibits others from achieving great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes yourself. Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a frustration that no one but you understands. But you do enjoy jobs that afford you a certain undersupervised control over a few individuals or small groups, preferably people and groups who are relatively helpless or in some way vulnerable. You are a teacher or a psychotherapist, a divorce lawyer or a high school coach. Or maybe you are a consultant of some kind, a broker or a gallery owner or a human services director. Or maybe you do not have a paid position and are instead the president of your condo minium association, or a volunteer hospital worker, or a parent.
3
M A RT H A S T O U T
Whatever your job, you manipulate and bully the people who are un der your thumb, as often and as outrageously as you can without get ting fired or held accountable. You do this for its own sake, even when it serves no purpose except to give you a thrill. Making people jump means you have power-or this is the way you see it-and bul lying provides you with an adrenaline rush. It is fun. Maybe you cannot be the CEO of a multinational corporation, but you can frighten a few people, or cause them to scurry around like chickens, or steal from them, or-maybe best of all-create sit uations that cause them to feel bad about themselves. And this is power, especially when the people you manipulate are superior to you in some way. Most invigorating of all is to bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps classier, more attractive or popular or morally admirable. This is not only good fun; it is existential vengeance. And without a conscience, it is amazingly easy to do. You quietly lie to the boss or to the boss's boss, cry some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworker's project, or gas light a patient (or a child), bait people with promises, or provide a little misinformation that will never be traced back to you. Or now let us say you are a person who has a proclivity for vio lence or for seeing violence done. You can simply murder your coworker, or have her murdered-or your boss, or your ex-spouse, or your wealthy lover's spouse, or anyone else who bothers you. You have to be careful, because if you slip up, you may be caught and punished by the system. But you will never be confronted by your conscience, because you have no conscience. If you decide to kill, the only difficulties will be the external ones. Nothing inside of you will ever protest. Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all. If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this 4
T H E S O C I OPAT H N E X T D O O R
from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. In fact, terrorism (done from a distance) is the ideal occupation for a person who is possessed of blood lust and no conscience, because if you do it just right, you may be able to make a whole nation jump. And if that is not power, what is? Or let us imagine the opposite extreme: You have no interest in power. To the contrary, you are the sort of person who really does not want much of anything. Your only real ambition is not to have to ex ert yourself to get by. You do not want to work like everyone else does. Without a conscience, you can nap or pursue your hobbies or watch television or just hang out somewhere all day long. Living a bit on the fringes, and with some handouts from relatives and friends, you can do this indefinitely. People may whisper to one another that you are an underachiever, or that you are depressed, a sad case, or, in contrast, if they get angry, they may grumble that you are lazy. When they get to know you better, and get really angry, they may scream at you and call you a loser, a bum. But it will never occur to them that you literally do not have a conscience, that in such a fun damental way, your very mind is not the same as theirs. The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or wakes you in the middle of the night. Despite your lifestyle, you never feel irresponsible, neglectful, or so much as em barrassed, although for the sake of appearances, sometimes you pre tend that you do. For example, if you are a decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how rotten you feel. This you do only because it is more convenient to have people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all the time, or insisting that you get a: job. You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they harangue someone they believe to be "depressed" or "troubled." As a matter of fact, to your further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of such a person. If, despite your relative poverty, you 5
M A R T H A S T O UT
can manage to get yourself into a sexual relationship with someone, this person-who does not suspect what you are really like-may feel particularly obligated. And since all you want is not to have to work, your financier does not have to be especially rich, just reliably conscience-bound. I trust that imagining yourself as any of these people feels insane to you, because such people are insane, dangerously so. Insane but real-they even have a label. Many mental health professionals refer to the condition of little or no conscience as "antisocial personality disorder," a noncorrectable disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population-that is to say, one in twenty-five people. This condition of missing con science is called by other names, too, most often "sociopathy," or the somewhat more familiar term, psychopathy. Guiltlessness was in fact the first personality disorder to be recognized by psychiatry, and terms that have been used at times over the past century include manie sans d€lire, psychopathic inferiority, moral insanity, and moral im
becility. According to the current bible of psychiatric labels, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders N of the American Psychiatric Association, the clinical diagnosis of "antiso cial personality disorder" should be considered when an individual possesses at least three of the following seven characteristics: ( 1 ) failure to conform to social norms; (2) deceitfulness, manipulative ness; (3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead; (4) irritability, aggres siveness; (5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others; (6) consistent irresponsibility; (7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mis treated, or stolen from another person. The presence in an individ ual of any three of these "symptoms," taken together, is enough to make many psychiatrists suspect the disorder. Other researchers and clinicians, many of whom think the APA's definition describes simple "criminality" better than true "psychopa thy" or "sociopathy," point to additional documented characteristics 6
T H E S O C I OPAT H N E XT D O OR
of sociopaths as a group. One of the more frequently observed of these traits is a glib and superficial charm that allows the true so ciopath to seduce other people, figuratively or literally-a kind of glow or charisma that, initially, can make the sociopath seem more charming or more interesting than most of the normal people around him. He or she is more spontaneous, or more intense, or somehow more "complex," or sexier, or more entertaining than everyone else. Sometimes this "sociopathic charisma" is accompa nied by a grandiose sense of self-worth that may be compelling at first, but upon closer inspection may seem odd or perhaps laughable. ("Someday the world will realize how special I am," or "You know that after me, 'no other lover will do,") In addition, sociopaths have a greater than normal need for stim ulation, which results in their taking frequent social, physical, finan cial, or legal risks. Characteristically, they can charm others into attempting dangerous ventures with them, and as a group they are known for their pathological lying and conning, and their parasitic relationships with "friends. " Regardless of how educated or highly placed as adults, they may have a history of early behavior problems, sometimes including drug use or recorded juvenile delinquency, and always including a failure to acknowledge responsibility for any prob lems that occurred. And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emo tion, the hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have, a certain breathtaking callousness. They have no trace of empathy and no genuine interest in bonding emo tionally with a mate. Once the surface charm is scraped off, their marriages are loveless, one-sided, and almost always short-term. If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may feel an gry to lose, but never sad or accountable. All of these characteristics, along with the "symptoms" listed by the American Psychiatric Association, are the behavioral manifesta7
M ART H A S TOUT
tions of what is for most of us an unfathomable psychological con dition, the absence of our essential seventh sense-conscience. Crazy, and frightening-and real, in about 4 percent of the pop ulation. But what does 4 percent really mean to society? As points of ref erence to problems we hear about more often, consider the follow ing statistics: The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated at 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of us-a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial per sonality-and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered "alarmingly high," is about 40 per 100,000-one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality. Put more succinctly, there are more sociopaths among us than people who suffer from the much-publicized disorder of anorexia, four times as many sociopaths as schizophrenics, and one hundred times as many sociopaths as people diagnosed with a known scourge such as colon cancer. As a therapist, I specialize in the treatment of psychological trauma survivors. Over the last twenty-five years, my practice has in cluded hundreds of adults who have been in psychological pain every day of their lives on account of early childhood abuse or some other horrendous past experience. As I have detailed in case studies in The Myth of Sanity, my trauma patients suffer from a host of torments, including chronic anxiety, incapacitating depression, and dissocia tive mental states, and, feeling that their time on earth was unbear able, many of them have come to me after recovering from attempts to commit suicide. Some have been traumatized by natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes and wars, but most of them have been controlled and psychologically shattered by individual human perpetrators, often sociopaths-sometimes sociopathic strangers, but more typically sociopathic parents, older relatives, or 8
T H E S O C I O P AT H N E X T D O O R
siblings. In helping my patients and their families cope with the harm done to their lives, and in studying their case histories, I have ' learned that the damage caused by the sociopaths among us is deep and lasting, often tragically lethal, and startlingly common. Working with hundreds of survivors, I have become convinced that dealing openly and directly with the facts about sociopathy is a matter of ur gency for us all. About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopathic, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. The intellectual difference between right and wrong does not bring on the emotional sirens and flashing blue lights, or the fear of God, that it does for the rest of us. Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five peo
ple can do anything at all. The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a pro found effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individu als who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth. Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopa thy-murderers, serial killers, mass murderers-people who have con spicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system. We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger num ber of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system pro vides little defense. Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between con ceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of 9
M A R T H A ST O U T
the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish. Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person. Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homi cidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers. The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender. What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron�or what makes the difference be tween an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer-is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple oppor tunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. For something like 96 percent of us, conscience is so fundamen tal that we seldom even think about it. For the most part, it acts like a reflex. Unless temptation is extremely great (which, thankfully, on a day-to-day basis it usually is not), we by no means reflect on each and every moral question that comes our way. We do not seriously ask ourselves, Shall I give my child lunch money today, or not? Shall I steal my coworker's briefcase today, or not? Shall I walk out on my spouse today, or not? Conscience makes all of these decisions for us, so quietly, automatically, and continually that, in our most creative flights of imagination, we would not be able to conjure the image of an existence without conscience. And so, naturally, when someone makes a truly conscienceless choice, all we can produce are explana tions that come nowhere near the truth: She forgot to give lunch money to her child. That person's coworker must have misplaced her briefcase. That person's spouse must have been impossible to live with. Or we come up with labels that, provided we do not inspect too -
10
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T H E S O C I O PAT H N E X T D O O R
closely, almost explain another person's antisocial behavior: He is "eccentric, " or "artistic, " or "really competitive, " or "lazy, " or "clue less, " or "always such a rogue. " Except for the psychopathic monsters we sometimes see on tele vision, whose actions are too horrific to explain away, conscienceless people are nearly always invisible to us. We are keenly interested in how smart we are, and in the intelligence level of other people. The smallest child can tell the difference between a girl and a boy. We fight wars over race. But as to what is possibly the single most mean ingful characteristic that divides the human species-the presence or absence of conscience-we remain effectively oblivious. Very few people, no matter how educated they are in other ways, know the meaning of the word sociopathic. Far less do they under stand that, in all probability, the word could be properly applied to a handful of people they actually know. And even after we have learned the label for it, being devoid of conscience is impossible for most human beings to fantasize about. In fact, it is difficult to think of another experience that quite so eludes empathy. Total blindness, clinical depression, profound cognitive deficit, winning the lottery, and a thousand other extremes of human experience, even psy chosis, are accessible to our imaginations. We have all been lost in the dark. We have all been somewhat depressed. We have all felt stu pid, at least once or twice. Most of us have made the mental list of what we would do with a windfall fortune. And in our dreams at night, our thoughts and our images are deranged. But not to care at all about the effects of our actions on society, on friends, on family, on our children? What on earth would that be like? What would we do with ourselves? Nothing in our lives, waking or sleeping, informs us. The closest we come, perhaps, is the experi ence of being in so much physical pain that our ability to reason or act is temporarily paralyzed. But even in pain there is guilt. Absolute guiltlessness defies the imagination. Conscience is our omniscient taskmaster, setting the rules for our -
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MARTHA STOUT
actions and meting out emotional punishments when we brea� the rules. We never asked for conscience. It is just there, all the time, like skin or lungs or heart. In a manner of speaking, we cannot even take credit. And we cannot imagine what we would feel like without it. Guiltlessness is uniquely confusing as a medical concept, too. Quite unlike cancer, anorexia, schizophrenia, depression, or even the other "character disorders," such as narcissism, sociopathy would seem to have a moral aspect. Sociopaths are almost invariably seen as bad or diabolical, even by (or perhaps especially by) mental health professionals, and the sentiment that these patients are somehow morally offensive and scary comes across vividly in the literature. Robert Hare, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, has developed an inventory called the Psychopathy Checklist, now accepted as a standard diagnostic instrument for re searchers and clinicians worldwide. Of his subjects, Hare, the dis passionate scientist, writes, "Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, manipulated, conned, and left bewildered by them. A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyones heartstrings. . . . Your best defense is to understand the nature of these human predators." And Hervey Cleckley, author of the 1941 classic text The Mask of Sanity, makes this complaint of the psychopath: "Beauty and ugli ness, except in a very superficial sense, goodness, evil, love, horror, and humor have no actual meaning, no power to move him. " The argument can easily be made that "sociopathy" and "antiso cial personality disorder" and "psychopathy" are misnomers, reflect ing an unstable mix of ideas, and that the absence of conscience does not really make sense as a psychiatric category in the first place. In this regard, it is crucial to note that all of the other psychiatric di agnoses (including narcissism) involve some amount of personal dis tress or misery for the individuals who suffer from them. Sociopathy stands alone as a "disease" that causes no dis-ease for the person who has it, no subjective discomfort. Sociopaths are often quite satisfied with themselves and with their lives, and perhaps for this very reason -
12
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T H E S O C I OPAT H N E X T D O O R
there is no effective "treatment. " Typically, sociopaths enter therapy only when they have been court-referred, or when there is some sec ondary gain to be had from being a patient. Wanting to get better is seldom the true issue. All of this begs the question of whether the absence of conscience is a psychiatric disorder or a legal designa tion-or something else altogether. Singular in its ability to unnerve even seasoned professionals, the concept of sociopathy comes perilously close to our notions of the soul, of evil versus good, and this association makes the topic diffi cult to think about clearly. And the unavoidable them-versus-us na ture of the problem raises scientific, moral, and political issues that boggle the mind. How does one scientifically study a phenomenon that appears to be, in part, a moral one? Who should receive our pro fessional help and support, the "patients" or the people who must endure them? Since psychological research is generating ways to "di agnose" sociopathy, whom should we test? Should anyone be tested for such a thing in a free society? And if someone has been clearly identified as a sociopath, what, if anything, can society do with that information? No other diagnosis raises such politically and profes sionally incorrect questions, and sociopathy, with its known relation ship to behaviors ranging from spouse battering and rape to serial murder and warmongering, is in some sense the last and most fright ening psychological frontier. Indeed, the most unnerving questions are seldom even whis pered: Can we say for sure that sociopathy does not work for the in dividual who has it? Is sociopathy a disorder at all, or is it functional? Just as unwelcome is the uncertainty on the flip side of that coin: Does conscience work for the individual, or group, who has it? Or is conscience, as more than one sociopath has implied, simply a psy chological corral for the masses? Whether we speak them out loud or not, doubts like these implicitly loom large on a planet where for thousands of years, and right up to the present moment, the most universally famous names have always belonged to those who could
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M A R T H A ST O U T
manage to be amoral on a large-enough scale. And in our present day culture, using other people has become almost trendy, and un conscionable business practices appear to yield unlimited wealth. On a personal level, most of us have examples from our own lives in which someone unscrupulous has won, and there are times when having integrity begins to feel like merely playing the fool. Is it the case that cheaters never prosper, or is it true, after all, that nice guys finish last? Will the shameless minority really inherit the earth? Such questions reflect a central concern of this book, a theme that occurred to me just after the catastrophes of September 1 1, 200 I, propelled all people of conscience into anguish, and some into despair. I am usually an optimistic person, but at that time, along with a number of other psychologists and students of human nature, I feared that my country and many others would fall into hate-filled conflicts and vengeful wars that would preoccupy us for many years to come. From nowhere, a line from a thirty-year-old apocalyptic song invaded my thoughts whenever I tried to relax or sleep: "Satan, laughing, spreads his wings. " The winged Satan in my mind's eye, roaring with cynical laughter and rising from the wreckage, was not a terrorist, but a demonic manipulator who used the terrorists' acts to ignite the kindling of hatred all over the globe. I became interested in my particular topic of sociopathy versus conscience during a phone conversation with a colleague of mine, a good man who is normally upbeat and full of encouragement but who was at that moment stunned and demoralized along with the rest of the world. We were discussing a mutual patient whose suici dal symptoms had become alarmingly worse, apparently on account of the disasters in the United States (and who has improved a great deal since then, I am relieved to report). My colleague was saying how guilty he felt because he was torn apart himself and might not have the usual amount of emotional energy to give to the patient. This extraordinarily caring and responsible therapist, overwhelmed -
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by events, like everyone else, believed he was being remiss. In the middle of judging himself, he stopped, sighed, and said to me in a weary voice highly uncharacteristic of him, "You know, sometimes I wonder, Why have a conscience? It just puts you on the losing team. " I was very much taken aback by his question, mostly because cynicism was so unlike this man's usual hale and hearty frame of mind. After a moment, I replied with another question. I said, "So tell me, Bernie. If you had a choice, I mean really, literally had a choice in the matter-which you don't, of course-would you choose to have a conscience like you do, or would you prefer to be sociopathic, and capable of . . . well, anything at all?" He considered this and said, "You're right" (although I had not meant to imply telepathy). 'Td choose to have a conscience. " "Why? " I pressed him. There was a pause and then a long, drawn-out "Well . . . " Finally, he said, "You know, Martha, I don't know why. I just know I'd choose conscience. " And maybe I was thinking too wishfully, but it seemed to me that after he made this statement, there was a subtle change in Bernie's voice. He sounded slightly less defeated, and we started to talk about what one of our professional organizations planned to do for the people in New York and Washington. After that conversation, and for a very long time, I remained in trigued by my colleague's question, "Why have a conscience?" and by his preference to be conscience-bound rather than conscience-free, and by the fact that he did not know why he would make this choice. A moralist or a theologian might well have answered, "Because it's right, " or "Because I want to be a good person." But my friend the psychologist could not give a psychological answer. I feel strongly that we need to know the psychological reason. Especially now, in a world that seems ready to self-destruct with global business scams, terrorism, and wars of hatred, we need to hear why, in a psychological sense, being a person of conscience is -
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M A RT H A S T OUT
preferable to being a person unfettered by guilt or remorse. In part, this book is my answer, as a psychologist, to that question, "Why have a conscience? " To get to the reasons, I first discuss people who are without conscience, the sociopaths-how they behave, how they feel-so that we can look more meaningfully into the value, for the other 96 percent of us, of possessing a trait that can be aggravating, painful, and-yes, it is true-limiting. What follows is a psycholo gist's celebration of the still small voice, and of the great majority of human beings who find themselves graced with a conscience. It is a book for those of us who cannot imagine any other way to live. The book is also my attempt to warn good people about "the so ciopath next door, " and to help them cope. As a psychologist and as a person, I have seen far too many lives nearly obliterated by the choices and acts of a conscienceless few. These few are both dan gerous and remarkably difficult to identify. Even when they are not physically violent-and especially when they are familiar and close to us-they are all too capable of mangling individual lives, and of mak ing human society as a whole an unsafe place to be. To my mind, this dominance over the rest of us by people who have no conscience at all constitutes an especially widespread and appalling example of what novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to as "the tyranny of the weak. " And I believe that all people of conscience should learn what the everyday behavior of these people looks like, so they can recog nize and deal effectively with the morally weak and the ruthless. Where conscience is concerned, we seem to be a species of ex tremes. We have only to turn on our televisions to see this bewilder ing dichotomy, to encounter images of people on their hands and knees rescuing a puppy from a drainage pipe, followed by reports of other human beings slaughtering women and children and stacking the corpses. And in our ordinary daily lives, though perhaps not so dramatically, we see the contrasts just as plentifully. In the morning, someone cheerfully goes out of her way to hand us the ten-dollar bill
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that we dropped, and in the afternoon, another person, gnnnmg, goes out of his way to cut us off in traffic. Given the radically contradictory behavior we witness every day, we must talk openly about both extremes of human personality and behavior. To create a better world, we need to understand the nature of people who routinely act against the common good, and who do so with emotional impunity. Only by seeking to discover the nature of ruthlessness can we find the many ways people can triumph over it, and only by recognizing the dark can we make a genuine affirma tion of the light. It is my hope that this book will play some part in limiting the so ciopath's destructive impact on our lives. As individuals, people of conscience can learn to recognize "the sociopath next door," and with that knowledge work to defeat his entirely self-interested aims. At the very least, they can protect themselves and their loved ones from his shameless maneuverings.
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the seventh sense
�. ��/C. . Virtue is not the absence of vices or tb€avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. - G . K. Chesterton
his morning, Joe, a thirty-year-old attorney, is running five min
T utes late for an extremely important meeting that, with or with
out him, will start promptly at eight o'clock. He needs to keep up a good impression with the more senior members of his firm, which means just about everybody, and he would like to have the first word
with these wealthy clients, whose concerns include Joe's budding specialty of estate planning. He has been preparing his agenda for days because he feels there is a lot at stake, and he very much wants to be in the conference room at the start of the meeting. Unfortunately, the furnace in Joe's town house suddenly stopped making heat in the middle of the night. Freezing and pacing, afraid the pipes would burst, he had to wait for the emergency repairman from the fuel company before he could leave for work this morning. When the man showed up, Joe let him in and then, desperate to get
to the meeting, abandoned him in the toWn house to fix the furnace,
hoping the fellow would prove reasonably honest. At last, Joe was
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MARTHA STOUT
able to race to his Audi and set off for the office, but with only twenty-five minutes left to make a thirty-minute drive. He resolved to bend the rules a little and make up the time. Now Joe is speeding along a familiar route to work, clenching his teeth and swearing under his breath at the slow drivers, at all the driv ers really. He reinterprets a couple of red lights, passes a line of traf fic by using the breakdown lane, and clings frantically to the hope that he can somehow make it to the office by 8:00. When he hits three green lights in a row, he thinks that he may just succeed. With his right hand, he reaches over to touch the overnight bag in the pas senger's seat, to reassure himself that he remembered to bring it. In addition to everything else, he has to catch a 10: 15 plane to New York this morning, a trip for the firm, and there will certainly not be time after the meeting to go back home for his things. His hand con tacts the cushiony leather of the bag-it is there and packed. And at this very moment, Joe remembers. He forgot to feed Reebok. Reebok is Joe's three-year-old blond Labrador retriever, so named because, before he got too busy at the firm, Joe used to take early-morn:ing runs with his enthusiastic new pet. When work took
over and the morning routine changed, Joe fenced in the small back
yard and installed a doggy door in the basement, allowing the dog
solo access to the outside. At this point, runs together in the park are weekends only. But exercise or not, Reebok consumes several pounds of Science Diet every week, along with a huge assortment of ' leftover human food and at least one full box of jumbo bone treats.
The young dog's appetite is stupendous, and he seems to live quite happily for two pleasures alone-his time with Joe, and his food. Joe got Reebok as a puppy, because when Joe was a boy, his fa ther would not let him have a pet, and he had vowed to himself that when he was grown up and successful, he would have a dog, a big one. At first, Reebok had been not very different from the Audi, an other acquisition, a marker of Joe's independence and material pros perity. But soon Joe had fallen in love with the animal himself. How -
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, could he not? Reebok adored Joe unconditionally, and from puppy hood had followed him around the house as if Joe were the center of .
.
all that was good in the universe. As his puppy grew to doghood, Joe realized that this creature had as distinct and individual a personal ity as any human being, and that his liquid brown eyes contained at least as much soul. Now, whenever Joe looks into those eyes, Reebok wrinkles his soft beige brow into several folded-carpet furrows and stares back. In this way, the sweet, ungainly dog appears preternatu rally thoughtful, as if he can read Joe's mind and is concerned. Sometimes when there is a business trip, like today, Joe is gone from home for a day and a half, or even a little longer, and each time he comes back, Reebok greets him at the door with bounding joy and instantaneous forgiveness. Before he takes one of these trips , Joe always leaves large mixing bowls full of food and water for Reebok to consume in his absence, which Reebok does easily. But this time, between the furnace problem and his panic about the 8:00 meeting, Joe forgot. The dog has no food and maybe even no water, and no way to get any until tomorrow evening, when Joe returns from his trip. Maybe I can call someone to help out, Joe thinks desperately. But no. He is between girlfriends at present, and so no one has a key to his house. The impossibility of his situation begins to dawn on him, and he grips the steering wheel even harder. He absolutely must make this meeting, and he can be there on time if he just keeps going. But what about Reebok? He will not starve to death in a day and a half, Joe knows, but he will be miserable-and the water-how long does it take an animal to die of dehydration? Joe has no idea. Still driving
as fast as the traffic will bear, he tries to think about his options. The
available choices tumble over one another in a rush. He can attend the 8:00 meeting and then go home and feed the dog, but that will make him miss his 10: 15 flight, and the trip is even more important than the meeting. He can go to the meeting and leave in the middle . -
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No, that would be seen as offensive. H e can try to get a later flight, but th�n he will be very late for his appointment in New York, may , even miss it entirely, which could cost him his job. He can ignore the dog until tomorrow. He can turn around now, miss the 8:00 meeting at the firm, take care of the dog, and still make it to the airport f�r his 10:15 flight. Like a man in pain, Joe moans loudly and slumps in his seat. Just ' a few blocks from work, he pulls the car into a spot marked STRUCTION ONLY,
CON
dials the office on his cell phone, and tells a secre- ,
'r'
tary to inform those at the morning meeting that he will not be attending. He turns the car around and goes home to feed Reebok.
"
" ' J
What Is Conscience? Amazingly, from a certain point of view, the human being we are , calling Joe decides to be absent from an important meeting with some wealthy clients, an event he has spent several days planning (; ,
:;:
for, and where his personal interests quite clearly reside. At first, he
I, i'
does everything he can to get to the meeting on time, risking all the
posSessions in his town house to a repairman he has never met be- ' , fore, and his own physical safety in his car. And then, at the very last
minute, he turns around and goes home to feed a dog, a guileless, , "
wordless creature who could not even so much as reprove Joe for ig- '
.
noring him. Joe sacrifices a high-stakes desire of his own in favor of an action that no one will witness (except maybe the repairman) , a ' choice that will not enrich him by even one penny. What could pos�,' sibly cause a young, ambitious lawyer to do such a thing? :" ! " Most readers will smile a little when Joe turns his car around. We :�, ;ff ' , feel pleased with him for going back to feed his dog. But why a�e we " ,
�
pleased? Is Joe acting out of conscience? Is this what we mean when
we make an approving remark about someone's behavior, such as', "His consci�nce stopped him"?
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T H E S O C I O P AT H N E X T D O O R
What is this invisible, inescapable, frustratingly incorruptible part of us we call -"conscience," anyway? The question is a complicated one, even as it pertains to the sim ple vignette about Joe and Reebok, because, surprisingly, there are a number of motivations other than conscience that, separately or to gether, might cause Joe-might cause any of us-to make an appar entry self-sacrificing choice. For example, perhaps Joe simply cannot stomach the thought of returning from his New York trip to find a Labrador retriever dehydrated and dead on his kitchen floor. Not knowing how long a dog can survive without water, he is unwilling to take the risk, but his aversion to the horrifying scenario is noyxactly conscience. It is something more like !:.�yulsion or fear. . ' . I>' Or maybe Joe is motivated by what the neighbors will think if they hear Reebok howling in hunger, or, worse, if they learn the dog has died, alone and trapped, while Joe was on a business trip. How will he ever explain himself to his friends and acquaintances? This worry is not really Joe's conscience, either, but rather his anticipation of serious embarrassment and social rejection. If this is why Joe goes back home to feed his dog, he is hardly the first human being to make a decision based on the dread of what others will think of him, rather than on what he might do if he were sure his actions would remain a complete secret. The opinions of other people keep us all in line, arguably better than anything else. Or maybe this is all a matter of the way Joe sees himself. Perhaps Joe does not want to view himself, in his own mind's eye, as the kind of wretch who would commit animal abuse, and his self-image as a decent person is crucial enough to him that, when he has no other alternative, he will forgo an important meeting in the service of pre serving that image. This is an especially plausible explanation for Joe's behavior. The preservation of self-image is a motivator of some notoriety. In literature and often i� histori�al accounts of human ac tion, dedication to one's own self-re�.!'cL is referred to as "honor." Lives"Eave been forfeited, �ars ha�� been fought over "honor." It is .'
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an ancient conce1l1. And in the modern field of psyc,hology, how we view <;>urselves translates to" the newer concept oC"self-esteem," a subject about which mote psychology books haye . been written than . perhaps any other si�gle topic. I Maybe Joe is willing to relinquish a few career points today in or der to feel okay when he looks at himself in the mirror tomorrow, in order to remain "honorable" in his own eyes. This would be laudable and very human-but it is not conscience. The intriguing truth of the matter is that much of what we do that looks like conscience is motivated by some other thing alto gether-fear, social pressure, pride, even simple habit. And where Joe is concerned, a number of readers will strongly favor an expla nation other than conscience because some of his behaviors are al ready questionable. He routinely leaves his young dog alone for many hours at a time, sometimes for nearly two days. This very morning, though he is skipping his meeting and going home to feed the dog, he still intends to make that 10: 15 flight and be gone until the following evening. Reebok will have no one to be with, and nowhere to go except a small fenced-in backyard.. Consigning a dog to such a situation is not very nice-it reflects, at best, a certain lack of empathy on Joe's part for the animal's social needs . . Still, truth to tell, being nice would not necessarily be conscience; either. For brief periods, any reasonably clever sociopath can act with saintlike niceness for his own manipulative purposes. And peo ple who do possess conscience are often unkind despite themselves, . out of ignorance or, as in Joe's case perhaps, inadequate empathy, or I - /;. just run-of-the-mill psychological deniaL Nice behavior, prudent action, thoughts about how other people will react to us, honorable conduct in the interest of our self-' regard-like conscience, all of these have a positive effect on the world at least most of the time, and any or all of them might get the . . ; dog fed sq,ql�times, but none can be defined as the individual's con- ' science. This IS because conscience is not a behavior at all.,.!lot some"
.
.., ��..... . "
.
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T H E S O C I O P AT H N E X T D O O R
thing that we do or even something that we think or mull over. . Conscience is somethin� tha� �� f::!: 1In other words, conscience is . . . neiTher-f)ehavlora] n�r cognitive. Consclence exists primarily in the realm of "affect," better known as .emotion . ., . - To clarify this distinction, let us take another look at Joe. He is not always nice to his dog, but does he have a conscience? What ev idence l would cause, say, a psychologist to decide that, when Joe passed up his meeting and went home to rescue Reebok, he was act ing out of conscience rather than because of what other people would think, or to preserve his own self-image, or maybe from the noteworthy financial consideration that, three years before, he had paid twelve hundred dollars for a purebred Labrador puppy guaran teed against hip dysplasia and heart disease? As a psychologist, 1 am persuaded most by a feature of the story we have not even addressed until now-the fact that Joe feels affec tion for Reebok. He i� �motio'1aJly _attadJ�d -t� -his . dog. R�eb�k fol� - - -- - -lows Joe around the house, and Joe likes it. Joe gazes into Reebok's eyes. Reebok has changed Joe from a trophy pet owner to a smitten pet owner. And on account of this attachment, 1 believe that when Joe gave up his morning plan and went home to take care of his dog, he may possibly have been acting out of conscience. If we could give Joe a truth serum and ask him what was going on inside him at the moment he decided to turn the car around, and he were to say some thing like, "I just couldn't stand it that Reebok was going to be there hungry and thirsty all that time," then 1 would be reasonably con vinced that Joe was conscience-driven in this situation. 1 would be basing my evaluation of Joe on the psychology of con science itself. Psychologically speaking, conscience is a sense of obligation ultimately based in an emotional attachment to another livi�{cre-atur(;· (�it�� but ��t al��y;-a h���n being), or to a g;�up . -. C;f h�ma�-b�i�gs, or even in some cases to humaniti �s a -whole. · , c � �� ci� �;e do� s �ot �xi;t w"ithC;ut an �;;�ti��al bondtCi ,s omeone or something, and in this way conscience is closely allied with "the spec. ,
'"
. "
-- ----- --_... ---- --
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M A R T HA S T O U T
trum of emotions we call "love." This , alliance is what gives true con science its resilience and its astonishing authority" over those who have it, and probably also its confusing and frustrating quality. Conscience can motivate us to make seemingly irrational and even self-destructive decisions, from the trivial to the heroic, from " missing an 8:00 meeting to remaining silent under torture for the love of one's country. It can drive us in this way only because its fuel is none other than our strongest affections. And witnessing or hear� ing about an act of.conscience, even one as ordinary as feeding a dog, pleases us, because any conscience-bound choice reminds us of the sweet ties that hind. A story about conscience is a �tory about ' the connectedness of living things, and in unconscious recognition, we smile at the true nature of the tale. We understand how excruci ating Joe's feelings are as he struggles with his conscience, and we smile at Joe and Reebok-because we always smile at lovers. The History of Conscience Not everyone has a conscience, this intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments to others. Some people will never experience the exquisite angst that results from letting others down, or hurting them, or depriving them, or even killing them. If the first five senses are the physical ones-sight, hearing, tou�h, smell, taste-and the "sixth sense" is how we refer to our intuition, then conscience can be numbered seventh at best. It devel<:>.ped latep in the evolution of our specie; and is still far from universal. T�-m'�� m�tters �urki�r: i� the clay-to-day course ofoiir lives, we are usually unable to tell the difference between those who pos sess ,conscience and those who do not. Could an ambitious young la'wyer conceivably have a seventh sense? Yes, conceivably. Could a mother ,of several young children have a seve�th sense? Of course she could. Could a ptiest, charged with the spirituahvelfare of an en-
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tire community, be conscience-bound? Let us hope so. Could the powerful political leader of a whole nation of people have a con science? Certainly. Or, contrastingly, could any of these people be utterly without con'science? The answer is once again, unnervingly, yes . The anonymity of "evil" and its maddening refusal to attach itself . ' 'reliably to any particular societal role, racial group, or physical type has always plagued theologians and, more recently, scientists. Throughout human history, we have tried mightily to pin down "good" and "evil," and to find some way to account for those in our midst who would seem, to be inhabited by tne latter. In the fourth century, the Christian scholar Saint Jerome introduced the Greek word synderesis to describe the innate God-given ability to sense the difference between good and evil. He interpreted Ezekiel's biblical . vision of four living creatures emerging from a cloud "with brightness round about it, and fire flashing forth continually." Each creature had the body of a man, but each had four different faces. The face in front was human, the face on the right was that of a lion, the left face was that of an ox, and the face in back was an eagle's. In Jerome's interpretation of Ezekiel's dream, the human face repre sented the rational part of man, the lion reflected the emotions, the ox symbolized the appetites, and the lofty eagle was "that spark of conscience which was not quenched even in the heart of Cain . . . that makes us, too, feel our sinfulness when we are overcome by evil Desire or unbridled Spirit. . , . And yet in some men we see this con science overthrown and displaced; they have no sense of guilt or shame for their sins." Jerome's illustrious contemporary, Augustine of Hippo, agreed with Jerome concerning the nature of conscience. Augustine assured his followers that "men see the moral rules written in the book of light which is called Truth from which all laws are copied." But a conspicuous problem remained. Since the Truth-the ab solute knowledge of good and evil-is given by God to all human be-
27
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MARTHA STOUT
ings, why are all human beings not good? Why do we "see this con science overthrown and displaced" in some people? And this ques tion remained at the center of the theological discussion about conscience for many centuries. Despite the sticky wicket, the alter native suggestion-the proposal that only some people had con science-was impossible to make, because it would have meant that by withholding the Truth from a few of His servants, God Himself had created evil in the world and had distributed it, in seeming ran domness, among all the types and enterprises of humanity. A solution to,the theological dilemma over conscience seemed to come in the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas proposed a roundabout distinction between synderesis, Saint Jerome's infallible God-given knowledge of right and wrong, and conscientia, which was comprised of mistake-prone human reason as it struggled to reach decisions about behavior. To make its choices . concerning which ac tions to take, Reason was supplied with perfect information from God, but Reason itself was rather weak. In this system, fallible hu man decision making, not a lack of conscience, is to blame for wrong decisions and actions. Doing wrong is simply making a mistake. In contrast, according to Aquinas, "Synderesis cannot err; it provides principles which do not vary, just as the laws that govern the physi cal universe do not vary." To apply this view to our contemporary example-when Joe re members that his dog is without food and water, God-given innate synderesis (conscience) immediately informs . him that the absolute right action is to return home and take care of the dog. Conscientia, a mental debate about how to behave, then takes this Truth into con sideration. The fact that Joe does not tum the car around instanta- ' neously but, instead, spends a few minutes deliberating is the result of the natural weakness of human reason. That Joe does make the right decision in the end means, in Aquinas's scheme, that Joe's ' . moral virtues are, through strengthened Reason, developing in the right direction. Had Joe decided to let the dog go hungry and thirsty, , -
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T H E S O C I O PAT H N E X T D O O R
his thereby weakened Reason would have been directing his moral virtues to Hell, theologically speaking. Getting down to theology's brass tacks, according to the early church fathers, ( 1 ) the rules of morality are absolute; (2) all people innately lmow the absolute Truth; and (3) bad behavior is the result of faulty thinking, rather than a lack of synderesis, or conscience, and since we all have a conscience, if only human reason were perfect, there would be no bad behavior. And indeed, these are the three be liefs l about conscience that have been held by much of the world throughout most of modem history. Their influence on the way we think about ourselves and other people, even today, is inestimable. The third belief is especially hard to let go of. Nearly a millennium after Aquinas made his pronouncement about synderesis, when someone consistently behaves in ways we find unconscionable, we . call on an updated version of the "weak Reason" paradigm. We spec ulate that the offender has been deprived, or that his mind is dis turbed, or that his early background makes him do it. We remain extremely reluctant to propose the more straightforward explanation that either God or nature simply failed to provide him with a con science. For several hundred years, discussions about conscience tended to center around the relationship between human reason and di vinely given moral knowledge. A few corollary debates were added, . most recently the one over proportionalism, a divine loophole wherein Reason asks us to do something "bad" in order to bring about something else that is "good"-a "just war," for example. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, conscience itself underwent a fundamental transformation, due to . the growing ac ceptance in Europe and the United States of the theories of physi cian/scientist (and atheist) Sigmund Freud. Freud proposed that in the normal course of development, young children's minds acquired an internalized authority figure, called a superego, that would in time replace the actual external authority-the actual external authority -
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MARTHA STOUT
being not God but one's. own human parents. With his "discovery" of the superego, Freud effectively wrested conscience out of the hands . ' of God and placed it in the anxious clutches of the all-too-human family. This change of address for conscience required some datlnt- . ing shifts in our centuries-old worldview. Suddenly, our moral guides had feet of clay, and absolute Truth began to submit to ,the uncer tainties of cultural relativism. Freud's new structural model of the mind did not involve a human part, a lion part, an ox part, and an eagle. Tripartite instead, his vision was of the superego, the ego, and the id. The id was composed of all the sexual and unthinking aggressive instincts we are born with, along with the biological appetites. As such, the id was often in conflict with the demands of a civilized society. In t�ntrast, the ego was the rational, aware part of the mind. It could think logically, make plans, and remember, and because the ego was equipped in these ways, it could interact. directly with society and, to varying degrees, get things done for the more primitive id. The superego grew out of the ego as the child incorporated the external rules of his or her parents and of society. The superego eventually became a free- . standing force in the developing mind, unilaterally judging and di recting the child's behaviors and thoughts. It was the commanding, guilt-brandishing inner voice that said no, even when nobody was around. The basic concept of superego makes common sense to us. We ' often observe children internalizing and even enforcing their par ents' rules. (Mother frowns and says, to her four-year-old daughter; �'No shouting in the car." A few minutes later, the same four-year-old points imperiously at her noisy two-year-old sister and shouts, "No shouting in the carl") And most of us, as adults, have heard our own superego. Some of us hear it quite often,in fact. It is the voice in our heads that says to us, Idiot! Why'd you do that? or You know, if y(!)u don't finish this report t<;might, you'll be sorry, or You'd better get your cholesterol checked. And in the story of Joe and Reebok, Joe's , " '.
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T H E S O C I O P AT H N E X T D O O R
decision to miss his meeting could easily have been made by his superego. For purposes of illustration, let us speculate that Joe's pet ; withholding father used to say to him when he was four, "No, little i Joey, we can't get a dog. A dog is a tremendous responsibility. When you have a dog, you always have to interrupt what you're doing and take care of it." Joe's adult decision to turn his car around could well have been directed by his superego, which insisted that he fulfill this very dictum. In a more abstruse manner, Freud himself might have wondered whether Joe's superego had caused Joe to set up his whole morning, unconsciously of course-being in too much of a hurry, forgetting to put out the dog food-such that his father's rule could be "proved," and Joe "punished" for getting a pet. For in Freudian theory, the superego is not just a voice; it is an operator, a -subtle and complex manipulator. li prover of points. It pros�cutes, j�dges� 'a�d c-��ries-out sentences, and it does all this quite outsicle of our conscious aware ness. While the superego, in the best case, can help the individual get along in society, it can also become the most overbearing and perhaps the most destructive part of his personality. According to psychoanalysts, an especially harsh superego, hammering away in� side someone's head, can create a lifelong depression, or even propel its poor victim into suicide. And so Freud introduced the world to the decidedly secular no tion that conscience II?:igh� n�ed to be repaired in some people,- and that through psychoanalysis, one �ight' ��t�aliy repair it. . In addition-more shock'i�g'still�F;;;d �nJli1S1�li��e�s linked the final establishment of the superego to the child's resolution of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex, sometimes called the Electra complex in girls, is formed when the young child begins to realize, between the ages of three and five, that he or she will never completely possess the parent of the opposite sex. In prosaic terms, boys must accept that they will not marry their mothers, and girls must accept that they will not marry their fathers. Oedipal struggles, -
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and the resulting feelings of competition, fear, and resentment toward the parent of the same sex, are so pbwerful and dangerous to :;; ' the child's family relationships, according to Freud, that they must . be thoroughly "repressed" or kept from awareness, and this "repres.- ) sian" is made possible by a drastic strengthening of the young super- ; ';', . I ego. From this point on, should any sexual feelings arise toward the parent of the opposite sex, or any rivalrous feelings toward the par" ent of the same sex, these feelings will be vanquished by the dreaded, ruthless w.eapon of the newly fortified superego-immedi ate, unbearable guilt. In this way, the superego gains its autonomy and its crowning advantage inside the mind of the child. It is a se� vere taskmaster. installed to serve our need to remain a part of the . gtoUp. Whatever else one may think of such theorizing, credit must be given to Freud for understanding that our moral sense was not a one-size-fits�all hermetic code, but was instead dynamic, and intti. cately tied up with essential family and societal bonds. With his writ� , ings on the superego, Freud imparted to an awakening scientific " world that our usual respect for law and order was not simply im- " posed on us from the outside. We obey the rules, we honor the ' virtues, primarily from an internal need that begins in infancy al'ld early childhood to preserve and remain embraced by our families and the larger human society in which we live. :
Conscience Versus Superego
Whether or not one believes that superego is an intrapsYchk schemer, or that it is, to use Freud's words, "the heir to the Oedipus complex," superego itself must be acknowledged as a rich and useflill . concept. As an inner voice acquired through our significant chi,l� hood relationships, commenting on our shortcomings and railing ,
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against our transgressions, superego is a feature of subjective expe rience that most people recognize easily. "Don't do that." "You shouldn't feel that way." "Be careful; you'll hurt yourself." "Be nice to your sister." "Clean up that mess you made." "You can't afford to buy that." "Well, that wasn't yery smart, was it?" "You've just got to deal with it." "Stop wasting time." Superego yammers at us inside our minds every day of our lives. And some people's superegos are rather more insulting than others. Still, superego is not the same thing as conscience. It may feel like conscience subjectively, and may be one small part of what con science is, but superego by itself is not conscience. This is because Freud, as he tonceptualized the superego, threw out the baby with the bathwater, in a manner of speaking. In ejecting moral absolutism from psychological thought, he counted out something else too. Quite simply, Freud counted out love, and all of the emotions re lated to love. Though he often stated that children love their parents in addition to fearing them, the superego he Wf?te about 'Yas en� j:�rely fe�r-b���_d. In his view, just as ';'e fear our parents' stem criti cisms when we are children, so do we fear the excoriating voice of superego later on. And fear is all. There is no place in the Freudian superego for the conscience-building effects �o� 1()'1.e C??lp���ion, tenderness, or any of the mo�_.po.�itiye (eel�!!� : kd �����ien:�e, �s -.;� h�ve seen in Joe and Reebok, is an inter vening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments to others-all aspects of our emotional attachments-including most especially love, compassion, and tenderness. In fact, the seventh sense, in those individuals '\\Tho po���ss jt, is primarily )loy�- ang compass�on-based . .'!Ie have progressed, .over the centuries, from faith in a God-directed synderesis, to a belief in a punitive parental superego, to an understanding that conscience is deeply and affect ingly anchored in our ability to care about one another. This second progression-from a judge in the head to a mandate of the heart• .
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, involves less cynicism about human nature, more hope for us as a group, and also more personal responsibility and, at times, more per sonal pain. As an illustration, imagine that under some impossibly bizarre set of circumstances, one night you take temporary leave ot your senses, sneak over to the house of an especially likable neighbor, and, for no particular reason, murder her cat. Just before daybreak, you recover your senses and realize what you haye done. What do you feel? What is the specific nature of your guilty reaction? Unseen behind your living room curtain, you watch your neighbor come but to her front step and discover the cat. She falls to her knees. She scoops up her lifeless pet in her arms. She weeps for a very long time. " What is the first thing that happens to you? Does a voice inside your head sci:eam, Thou shalt not kill! You'll go to jail for this!-thus reminding you of the consequences to yourself? Or, instead, do you feel instantly sick that you have murdered an animal and �ade your neighbor cry in grief? , In those first moments of watching your ' stricken neighbor, which reaction is more likely to befall you? It is a telling question. The answer will probably determine what course of action you will take, and also whether you are influenced only by the strident voice of your superego, or by a genuine conscience. The same kind of question applies to our old friend Joe. Does he decide to sacrifice his meeting beca�se of the unconscious fear in stilled in him in childhood by his father's opinions about dogs, Or does he make the sacrifice because he feels awful when he thinks , about Reebok's predicament? What directs his choice? Is it pure superego, or is it fully formed conscience? If it is conscience, theI) Joe's decision to be absent from a scheduled meeting at work is a mi nor illustration of the fact that, ironically; conscience does not always follow the rules. It places people (and sometimes animals) ' above �'cbdes of conduct and institutional expectations. Fortified with :pb� tent emotions, conscience is a glue that holds us together, and it is stickier than it is just. It cherishes humanistic ideals more tl?an laws, .
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and if push comes to shove, conscience may even go to prison. , Superego would never do that. A strict superego berates us, saying, You're being naughty, or You're inadequate. A strong conscience insists, You must take care of him [or her or it or them] , no matter what. Fear-based superego stays behind its dark curtain, accusing us and wringing its hands. Conscience propels us outward in the direc tion of other people, toward conscious action both, minor and great. Attachment-based conscience causes the teenage mother to buy the little jar of creamed peas instead of her favorite fingernail polish. , Conscience protects the privil��es of intimacy, makes , friends keep their promises, prevents the angered spouse from striking back. It in duces the exhausted doctor to pick up the phone for his frightened patient at three in the morning. It blows whistles against institutions when lives are endangered. It takes to the streets to protest a war. Conscience is what makes the human rights worker risk her very life. When it is combined with surpassing moral courage, it is Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi. In small and large ways, genuine conscience changes the world. Rooted in emotional' connectedness, it teaches peate and opposes . hatred and saves children. It keeps marriages together and cleans up rivers and feeds dogs and gives gentle replies. It makes individual , lives better and increases human dignity overall. It is real and com pelling, and it would make us crawl out of our skin if we devastated our neighbor. The problem, as we are about to see, is that not everybody has it. In fact, 4 percent of all people do not have it. Let us turn now to a discussion of such a person-someone who simply has no con science-and see what he looks like to us.
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Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain. -Doug Horton
hen Skip was growing up, his family had a vacation cottage by a small lake in the hills of Virginia, where they went for a part of each summer. They vacationed there from the time Skip was eight years old until he went away to high school in Massachusetts. Skip looked forward to his summers in Virginia. There was not a lot to do there, but the one activity he had invente,d was so much fun that it made up for the general lack of excitement. In fact, sometimes bac�: at grade school in the winter, escaping into his own thoughts wh:Ucr some stupid teacher went on and on about something, he would g�t a picture of himself playing his game by the warm Virginia lake, �,1\
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not know was that from the age of eleven, Skip had been out with plenty of girls, but not quite in the way his parents and teachers were imagining. There was always someone, usually an older girl, who was willing to succumb to Skip's flattery and his charming smile. Often the girl would sneak him into her room, but sometimes he and a girl would simply find a secluded spot · on a playground or under the bleachers at the softball field . As for his grades, he really was ex tremely smart-he could have made straight A-plusses-but get ting C's was completely effortless, and so that was what he did. Occasionally, he would even get a E, which amused him, since he ne,:,er studied. The teachers liked him, seemed to,be almost as vul nerable to his smiles and his compliments as the girls were, and everyone assumed that young Skipper would end up at a good high school and then a decent co�lege, despite his grades. His parents had a great deal of money, were "megarkh," as the other kids put it. On several occasions when he was about twelve, Skip sat at the antique rolltop desk his parents had bought for his bedroom, trying to calculate how much money he would get when they died. He based his calculations on some financial records he had stolen from his father's study. The records were confusing and incomplete, but even though he could not arrive at an exact figure, Skip could see clearly that someday he would be quite rich. . Still, Skip had a problem. He was bored most of the time. The am�sements he pursued, even the girls, eve� fooling the teachers, even thinking about his money, did not keep him energized for longer than half an hour or so. The family wealth held the most promise as an entertainment, but it was not under his control yet he was still a child. No, the only real relief from boredom was the fun he could have in Virginia. Vacations Were a very good time. That first summer, when he was eight, he had simply stabbed the bullfrogs with a scissors, for want of another method. He had discovered that he could take a net from the fishing shed and capture the frogs eas ily from the mud banks of the lake . He would hold them down on -
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their backs, stab their bulging stomachs, and then tum them back over to watch their stupid jelly eyes go dead as they bled out. Then he would hurl the corpses as far out into the lake as he could, yelling at the dead frogs as they flew, "Too bad for you, you little fuck-face froggy!" There were so many frogs in that lake. He could spend hours at a time killing them, and still it looked as if there were hundreds and hundreds of them left for tomorrow. But by the end of that first summer, Skip had decided that he could do better. He was tired of stabbing the frogs. It would pe so great to blow them up, to have something that would make the fat little squirmers explode, and toward this end he had a really good plan. He knew plenty of older boys back home, and one in particular he knew took a family trip to South Carolina during spring break every April. Skip had heard that fireworks were for sale and easy to get in South Carolina. With a lit tle bribe from Skip, his friend Tim would buy him some fireworks there and smuggle them home in the bottom of his suitcase. Tim would be scared to do it, but with a pep talk from Skip, and enough money, he would. Next summer, Skip would have not scissors but fireworks! Finding cash around the house was no problem, and the plan worked like a chaJ;'tn. That April, he came up with two hundred dol lars for a fireworks variety pack called "Star-Spangled Banner," which he had seen in a gun magazine, and another one hundred dollars to sweeten the deal for Tim. And when Skip finally got his hands on the package, it was a beautiful thing. He had chosen "Star-Spangled Banner" because it contained the largest number of devices small enough to fit, or almost fit, into the mouth of a bullfrog. There was a supply of tiny Roman candles; and some "Lady Fingers," which were slim little red firecrackers; and a bunch of one-inch shells called "Wizards"; and his favorite, some two-inch shells in a box labeled "Mortal Destruction," which had a skull and crossbones blazoned on the front. -
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That summer, he shoved the devices, one by one, into the mouths of the captured frogs, ignited them, and threw the frogs high into the air over the lake. Or sometimes he would put the ignited frog down, run off, and watch from a distance as the animal ex ploded on the ground. The displays were. magnificent-blood, goo, lights, sometimes a big noise and those colorful flowerlike shapes. So wonderful were the results that soon he began to crave an audience for his genius. One afternoon, he enticed his six-year-old sister, Claire, down to the lake, let her help him capture one of the frogs, and then before her eyes, made an airborne explosion of it. Claire screamed hysterically and ran as fast as her legs would carry her back to the house. The family's stately "cottage" sat about half a mile from the lake, beyond a serene stand of hundred-foot hemlocks. This was not so far away that Skip's parents had not heard explosive noises, and they imagined that Skipper must be setting off fireworks by the lake. But they had long since realized that he was not the sort of child who could be controlled, and that they needed to choose their battles very carefully. The fireworks issue was not one they chose to deal with, not even when six-year-old Claire came running in to tell her mother that Skipper was blowing up frogs. Skip's mother turned up the record player in the library as loud as it would go, and Claire tried to hide her cat, Emily.
Super Skip
Skip is soCiopathic. He has no conscience-no intervening sense of . . obligation based in emotional attachments to others-and his later life, which we will get to in a moment, provides an instructive exam ple of what an intelligent adult without a conscience can look like. Just as it is difficult to imagine how we would feel if we had no conscience at all, so it is very hard to use one's imagination to con39
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struct an accurate picture of such a person. Amoral and uncaring, does he end up isolated on the edges of society? Does he constantly threaten and snarl and quite possibly drool, devoid as he is of such a fundamental human characteristic? One might easily imagine that Skip· grew up to be a killer. In the end, perhaps he murdered his par ents for their money. Maybe he wound up dead himself, or in the bowels of a maximum-security prison. Sounds likely, but nothing of the kind actually happened. Skip is still alive, he .has never killed any one, not directly at least, and-so far-he has not seen the inside of any prison. To the contrary, though he has not yet inherited his par ents' mOney, he has become successful and richer than a king. And if you met him now, encountered him as a stranger in a restaurant or on the street, he would look like any other well-groomed middle aged fellow in a pricey business suit. How could this possibly be? Did he have a recovery? Did he get better? No. In truth, he got worse. He became Super Skip. With passing, if not stellar, grades, his charm, and his family's in fluence, Skip did indeed get into that good boarding school in Massachusetts, and his family breathed a sigh of relief, both for his acceptance by the school and for his relative absence from their lives. His teachers still found him charismatic, but his mother and si�ter had learned that he was manipulative and spooky. Claire would sometimes speak of "Skipper's weird eyes," and her mother would give her a defeated look that said, I don't want to talk about it. Most everyone else saw only a handsome young face. When college came around, Skip was accepted into his father's alma mater (and his grandfather's before that), where he became legendary as a party boy and a ladies' man. Graduating with his cus tomary C average, he entered an MBA program at a less prestigious institution, because he had figured out that the business world was a place where he might master the game easily and amuse himself using his natural skills. His grades got no better, but his lifelong abil-
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, tty to charm people and get them to do what he wanted became more refined. When he was twenty-six, he joined the Arika Corporation, a company that made blasting, drilling, and loading equipment for metal-ore mines. He had intense blue eyes and a stunning smile at all the right moments, and to his new employers he seemed almost magically talented at motivating sales representatives and influenc ing contacts. For his part, Skip had discovered that manipulating ed ucated adults was no harder than it had been to convince his young friend Tim to buy fireworks in South Carolina, and of course lying, in increasingly elegant ways, came as easily as breathing. Even bet ter, chronically bored Skip relished the pressures of fast-track risk taking and was more than willing to take the big chances that no one else would. Before his third anniversary at the company, he had gone after the copper in Chile and the gold in South Africa, eventually making Arika into the world's third-largest vendor of both shaft and open-pit mining equipment. Arika's founder, whom Skip privately viewed as a fool, was so enchanted with Skip that he gave him a new Ferrari GTB as a "corporate gift." ; When he was thirty, 'skip married Juliette, the lovely, soft-spoken twenty-three-year-old daughter of a celebrated billionaire who had made his fortune in oil exploration. Skip made sure that juliette's fa ther saw him as the brilliant, ambitious son he had never had. Skip saw his billionaire father-in-law as what he was, a ticket to just about everything. And, quite accurately, he saw his new wife, Juliette, as a sweet', repressed gentlewoman who would thoroughly accept her role as wife and social coordinator, and who would pretend not to know that Skip's life remained just as devoid of personal responsibil ity and full of random sexual encounters as it had ever been. She. would be attractive and respectable on his arm, and she would keep het: mouth shut. A week before the wedding, Skip's mother, already feeling closer
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to Juliette than to Skip, wearily inquired of her son, "This mar riage . . . Do you really need to do this to her life?" Skip started to ignore her, as he usually did. But then he was apparently struck by , something funny, and he replied to her protest with �n ear-to-ear grin. "We both know she'll never know what hit her," he said. Skip'S mother looked confused for a moment, and then she shuddered. Married, socially ensconced, and bringing in close to $80 million a year for Arika, Skip was made president of its international division and a member of the board before his thirty-sixth birthday. By this time, he and Juliette had two little girls, completing his public dis guise as a family man. His contributions to the business came with a certain price, but nothing that could not be handled i� a cost efficient manner. Employees sometimes complained that he was "in suIting" or "vicious," and Arika was sued when a secretary claimed he had broken her arm while trying to force her to sit in his lap. The case was settled .out of court with fifty thousand dollars and a gag or der for the secretary. Fifty thousand dollars was nothing to the com pany, relatively speaking. He was "Super Skip," and his employer understood that he was well worth the upkeep. Of the incident, Skip later remarked privately, "She's insane. She broke her own arm. She struggled with me, the stupid bitch. Why the hell did she put up such a fight?" After the secretary, there were additional charges of sexual II).is conduct, but Skip was so valuable to the organization that each time a problem came up, Arika simply disbursed another check to make . sure it went away. The other board members began to refer to hipl as their "company prima donna." As the years passed, he received grants of more than 1 million shares, making him the second-largest individual shareholder, after Arika's founder. And in 200 1 , at the age of fifty-one, Skip took over as chief executive. More recently, some of his problems have become slightly less manageable, but with his usual arrogance, Skip is confident he will land on his feet-perhaps a little too confident. In 2003, he was ac-
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cused of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He de nied the charge, of course, and at present the decision of the SEC is pending. Playing the Game No, Skip was not consigned to the edges of society, he does not drool, and he is not (yet) in prison. In fact, he is rich and, in many circles, respected-or at least feared, which masquerades brilliantly as respect. So what-is wrong with this picture? Or perhaps the ques, tion should be: What is the worst part of this picture, the central flaw in Skip's life that makes him into a tragedy despite his success, and into the maker of tragedies for so many others? It is this: Skip has no emotional attachments to other people, none at all. He is cold as ice. His mother is there to be ignored, or sometimes baited. His sis ter is there to be' tormented. Other women are sexual plunder and nothing more. He has been waiting since childhood for his father to do only one thing-to die and leave his money to Skip. His employ ees are there to be manipulated and used, as his friends have always been. His wife and even his children are meant for the eyes of the world. They are camouflage. Skip is intellectually gifted, and he is fabulous at the gamesmanship of business. But by far his most im pressive talent is his ability to conceal from nearly everyone th,e true ' emptiness of his heart-and to command the passive silence of those few who do know. Most of us are irrationally influenced by appearance, ' and Skipper has always looked good, He knows just how to smile. He is charming, and we can readily imagine him showering flattery on the boss who gave him the Ferrari, meanwhile thinking him lhe fool, and underneath it all being incapable of gratitude toward anyone. He lies artfully and constantly, with absolutely no sense:; of guilt that might give him away in body language or facial expression. He uses sexu- , -
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ality as manipulation and hides his emotional vacancy behind vari ous respectable roles--corporate superstar, son-in-law, husband, fa ther-which are nearly impenetrable disguises. And if the charm and the sexuality and the role playing somehow fail, Skip uses fear, a sure winner. His iciness is fundamentally scary. Robert Hare writes, "Many people find it difficult to deal with the intense, emotionless, or 'predatory' stare of the psychopath," and for some of the more sensitive people in his life, Skip's intense blue eye�, the ones his sister sees as "weird," may well be those of the dispas sionate hunter gazing at his psychological prey. If so, the result will probably be silence. For even if you know about him, know what his heart is like, and have caught on to his modus operandi, how will you call him out? Whom can you possibly tell, and what will you say? "He's a liar"? "He's crazy"? "He raped me in his office"? "He's got spooky eyes"? "He used to kill frogs"? But this is a leader of the community, in an Armani suit. This is Juliette's beloved husband, and the father of two: This man is the CEO of the Arika Corporation, for goodness sake! Just what are you accusing him of, and what proof do you have? Who is going to sound crazier--chief executive Skip, or his accuser? Al).d sealing his invulnerability, there are those who need Skip to be around for one reason or another, including people who are wealthy ' and powerful. Are they going to care what you say? In his unassailability, and in many other ways, Skip is an exem plary sociopath. He has, in the words of the American Psychiatric , so he Association, "a greater than normal need for stimulation," and , .'----.-often takes big risks, and he guiltlessly charms others into takiq.g them, too. He has a history of undocumented childhood "behavi(;ir problems," obscured by his parents' social privilege. He is deceitfuJ and manipulative. He can be impulsively aggr�e with "a reckless disregard for the safety of others," as he was with the employe� whose arm he br�ke, and with the other women whose stories will never be heard. Perhaps the only classic "symptom" Skip does not -
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_exhibit is substance abuse. The dosest he ever comes to that is one too m:any scotches after dinner. Otherwise, the picture is complete. He is not genuinely interested in bonding with anyone, he is consis ' tently irresponsible, and he has no remorse. Arid so how does all of thi� t�rn iri liis mind? What makes him tick? What exactly does Skip want? Most of us have other people to motivate us and to populate our desires. People drive our wishes and our dreams. People who live . with us, people who are far away, beloved people who have died, ag gravating people who will not leave, places made sentimental by whom we knew there, even our pets-these fill our hearts and our thoughts. Even the most introverted among us is defined by her re lationships, and preoccupied with reactions to and feelings about, antipathies and affections for, other people. Emotional intrigue, ro mance, nurturing, rejection, and reunion comprise nearly all of our literature and s�ng. We are overwhelmingly relational creatures, and this is true all the way back to our primate ancestors. Jane Goodall says the chimpanzees she observed in Gombe "have a rich repertoire of behaviours that serve to maintain or restore social harmony. . . . The embracing, kissing, patting and holding of hands that serve as greetings after separation . . . The long, peaceful sessions of relaxed social grooming. The sharing of food·; The concern for the sick or wounded." And so without our primordial attachments to others, what would we be? Evidently, we would be the players of a game, one that resembled a giant chess match, with our fellow human beings as the rooks, the knights, and the pawns. For this is the essence of sociopathic be havior, and desire. The only, thing Skip really wants-'-the only thing , , left-li�- t�" \viD.; \ Skip does p'ot spend any time searching for someone to love. He canl),ot love. He does not worry about friends or family members who may be sick or in trouble, because he cannot worry about other people. He cares nothing for others, and so he cannot enjoy telling ,I -�.. ---,---.,.
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. his parents or his wife about his many successes in the business world. He can have dinner with whomever he pleases, but he cannot share the moment with anyone at alL And when his childre� were > born, he was not scared, but neithe� was he e�cited. He can derive n� reaT]oyJrom ' bei�g with-them, o� f�om watching them gro� up. But there is one thing Skip ca� do, and he does this one thing better than almost anyone els� S�ip' . is brilliant at winning: lJIe can dominate. He can bend others to his will. When he was a boy, the frogs died when he' decided they should die, his sister screamed when he wanted her to, and now he has gone on to bigger and bet ter games. In a world where people struggle just to make a living, Skip convinced others to make him rich before he was thirty. He can make fools of his · well-educated employers and even his billionaire father-in-law. He can cause. these otherwise-sophisticated people to jump, and then laugh at them behind their backs. He influences large financial decisions on an international playing field, can turn most such arrangements to his own advantage, and no one protests. Or if someone 'does complain, he can cut that person off at the knees with just a well-placed word or two. He ca? frighten people, assault them, break an arm, ruin a career, and his wealthy colleagues will fall all over themselves making sure he never pays the penalties any or dinary person would pay. He believes he can have any woman he wants, and manipulate any man he comes across, including, most re cently, everyone at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He is Super Skip. Strategies and payoffs are the only thrills he knows, and he has spent his entire life getting better at the ga�e. For Skip, the game is everything, and though he is too shrewd to say so, he thinks .!herest of us are naIve and stupid for not plcmng it his ' way. And this is exactly what happens to the human mind when '-7motional attachment and conscience are missing. Life is reduced to a contest, and other hu�an beings seem to be nothing more th?n game pieces, to be moved about, used as shields, or ejected. Of course, few individuals equal Skip in the level of his IQ or in -
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his physical appearance. By definition, most people, including so ciopaths, are average in intelligence and looks, and the games that average sociopaths' play are n9t in the same elite league as Super Skip's global competitions. Many contemporary p�chologists, my self included, recall first learning about psychopathy from an educa tional movie on the subject, viewed when we were college students in the 1970s. The nebbishy case study in the movie is remembered as "Stamp Man," because he devoted his whole life to the unlikely project of stealing postage stamps from United States post offices. He was not interested in possessing the stamps, or in selling them for cash. His only ambition was to execute a simple break-in at night and then find a spot a little distance from the post office he had just robbed, where he could watch the frenzy of the first employees to enter the building in the morning, followed by the emergency arrival of the police. Skinny, pale, and mouselike, the man interviewed ' in the movie was anything but scary. His intelligence was average at most, and he could never have played Skip's grand international game, with its masterful strategies and billionaire opponents. But he could play his own game, and psychologically, his simple stamp stealing game was surprisingly 'similar to Skip's corporate one. Unlike Skip's, Stamp Man's plans were inelegant and transpar ent, and he was always discovered and arrested. He had been to court and then to jail countless times, and this was the way he lived his life-robbing, watching, going to jail, getting out of jail, and rob bing again. But he was unconcerned, because the eventual outcome of his scheming was irrelevant to him. From his perspective, all that mattered was playing the game and seeing, at least for an hour or so each time, the irrefutable evidence that, he, ' Stamp Man, could make - \... -- -----' people jump. In Stamp Man's opinion, being able to make people .- JU�P ;n�;�t he was winning, and in this way, no less than phe nomenally affluent Skip, he illustrates what a sociopath wants. Controlling others-winning-is more compelling than anything (or -anyoiier else : - "�' -
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Perhaps the ultimate in dominating another person is to take a life, . and the psychopathic murderer or cold-blooded serial killer is the first thing �any of us imagine when we think of sociopathic de viance. Short of a sociopathic leader who diverts the course of an entire nation; leading it into genocide or unnecessary war, the psy chopathic killer is surely the most terrifying example of a psyche without' conscience-the most terrifying example, but not the most common one. Homicidal sociopaths are notorious. We read about them in newspapers, hear about them on television, see them por trayed in .films, ·and we are shaken to our core by the knowledge that in our midst there are sociopathic monsters who can kill without pas sion or remorse. But contrary to popular belief, most sociopaths are not murderers, at least not in the sense that they kill with their own two hands. We can see this from statistics alone. About one in twenty-five people are sociopathic, but outside of prisons, or gangs and other poverty- and war-torn groups, the incidence of murderers in our population is, thankfully, far less. When sociopathy and blood lust come together in the same per son, the result is a dramatic-even a cinematic-nightmare, a horror figure who seems larger than life. But most sociopaths are not mass murderers or serial killers. They are not Pol Pot or Ted Bundy. Instead, most are only life-si,ze, like the rest of us, and can remain unidentified for long periods of time. Most people without con science are more like . Skip or Stamp Man, or the mother who uses her children as tools, or the therapist who deliberately disempowers vulnerable patients, or the seduce-and-manipulate lover, or the busi ness partner who empties the bank account and vanishes, or the charming "friend" who uses people and insists she has not. The methods sociopaths dream up to control others-the schemes con tr�ved to ensure "wins"-are quite various, and only a few of them have to do with physical violence. Mter all, violence is conspicuous, and unless performed against the utterly powerless, such as children or animals., it is likely to get the_perpetrator caught. -
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, In any case, though they are horrifying when they occur, brutal murders are not the likeliest result of consciencelessness; Rather, the game is the thing: The prize to be won can run the gamut f��� world - -dominatioii 'to a f��'t dunch, ouf it is al��ys th� ';a:me game-con trolling, -��klng -clhersj��p , ·'winning.;; -E;;:dently-: ��ni�g �' thi� -� . f�shion i;--;il th�t -i;;�;in; �f�t-�rpers(;'nal meaning when �ttach ment and conscience are absent. When the value of relationships has been reduced to nearly nothing, dominance is sometimes asserted by murdering people. But more often, it is accomplished by killing frogs, or racking up.sexua:l conquests, ' or seducing and using friends, ' or exploitmg -th�' c;;pp�r- i�-C hii� , ;; stealing so'me p�stage stamps just to see people scramble.
Do Sociopaths Know They Are Sociopaths?
Do sociopaths understand what they are? Do they have some. insight into their nature, or, instead, could they read this book from cover to cover and fail to see themselves reflected? In my work, I am often asked these kinds of questions, especially by people whose lives have been derailed by collisions with sociopaths whom they did �ot rec ognize as such until it was too late. I do not know exactly why the is sue of insight assumes so much importance, except perhaps for our feeling that if a person gets through life totally without conscience, he or she should at least acknowledge that very fact. We 'feel _that if someone is bad, he should be burdened with. the knowledge thif Ile- is-Ead. If seems- to l ls the ultimate in injustice fh�t a person coUld ,.. ' be , "�vil, b� our assessment: ana stilf feel fine �bout himself. However, this is exactly what seems to h�ppe·n. ' For the most part, people whom we assess as evil tend to 'see nothing at all wrong with t��ir. w�y ?� 3:iE�, �_��e' w:>�!£�oC��p�th� ' are;infam?ur !?� _ . _ their refusal to acknowledge ... ..... responsibility for the.. decisions ...they make, or for the outcomes of their decisions. In fact, a refusal to see •
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the results of one's bad behavior as having anything to do with one self-"consistent irresponsibility" in the language of the American Psych�rnerstone of the antisocial persoi!al ' tty diagnosis. Skip illustr'ited this aspect of his personality when he expTained that the employee whose arm he broke had actually bro ken her o� arm when she did not submit to him readily enough. People without conscience provide endless examples of such stun ning "I've done nothing wrong" statements. One of the most famous is a quotation from Chicago's sadistic Prohibition gangster, Ai Capone: "I am going to St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job-it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor." Other sociopaths do not bother with such convoluted reasoning, or they are not in commanding-enough positions to have anyone listen to their outra geous logic. Instead, when confronted with a destructive outcome that is clearly their doing, they will say, plain and simple, :! �:ver did that," and will to all appearances believe their own direct lie. This '1�at��� ' of s?ciopath); m�kes self-awareness imp��sible, and in the end, just as the sociopath has no genuine relationships with other people, he has only a very tenuo�s .one with himself. 1 ' (. . If anything, people without conscience tend to believe their way of being in the world is superior to ours. They often speak of the naivet¢ . of other people and their ridiculous scruples, ot of their cU riosity' ,about .... why so many people are unwilling to manipulate others, even in the service of their most important ambitions. Or they theorize that all people are the same-unscrupulous, like them-but are dishonestly playacting som�thing mythical called "conscience." By this latter ,. proposition, .. the/'only straightforward and honest people in the world are they themselves. They are being "real" in a society of phonies. Still! I believe that somewhere buried safely away from con . sciousness, there may be a faint internal murmuring that something •
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. is missing, something that other people have. I say this because I \ have heard sociopaths speak of feeling "empty" or even "hollow. " And I say this because what sociopaths envy, and may seek to de stroy as a part of the game, is usually somethin� in the character structure of a person with conscience, and strong characters are of. . \.. .. ... . ten specially targeted by sociopaths. And most of all, I say this because it is human beings who are targeted, rather than the earth itself, or some aspect of the material world. Sociopaths want to play their games with other people. They are not so much interested in challenges from the inanimate. Even the destruction of the World Trade towers was mainly about the people who were in them, and the people who would see and hear about the catastrophe. This sim ple but crucial observation implies that, in sociopathy, t�ere re�ains some innate ids!}tificat�on with other human beings, a tie with the species itself. H owever, this thin inborn connection, which e�ables envy, is one-dimensional and sterile, especially when contrasted with the vast array of complex and highly charged emotional responses most people have to one another and. to their fellow human beings as a group. If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to "win," how would you understand the meaning of love, of friend ship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior,. Perhaps you wo�ld experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatis' faction, but that is all. And with the wholesale denial_ of your true impact on other people, how would you understand who you were? Once again, you would not. Like Super Skip himself, Super Skip's mirror can tell only lies. His glass does not show him the icine'ss of his soul, and the Skip who spent his childhood summers mutilating bullfrogs by an otherwise-peaceful Virginia lake will eventually go to . his grave not understanding that his life could have been full of ,I meaning and warmth. .
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when normal con S C lence s leeps
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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onscience is a creator of meaning. As a sense of �onstraint rooted in our emotional . ties to one another, it prevents life , from devolving into nothing but a long and essentially boring game of attempted dominance over our fellow human beings, and for every limitation conscience imposes on us, it gives us a moment of connectedness with an other, a bridge to someone or something out side of our often meaningless schemes. Considering the ice-cold al ternative of being someone like Skip, conscience is devoutly to be ' wished. So the question arises: In the 96 percent of us who are not sociopathic, does conscience ever chan.,ge? Does it ever waver or weaken-or die? ..-.. ---.-... �.----�... The truth is that even a normal person's conscience does not operate on the same level all of the time. One of the simplest reasons for this changeability is the fundamental circumstances of living ihside ' a fallible, need-driven human body. When our bodies are e�-
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hausted, sick, or injured, all of our emotional functions, including conscience, can be temporafily compromised. To illustrate this, as he drives along in his car, let us give attorney . Joe, owner of Reebok, a dizzying fever of about 102 degrees. We can see right away that his common sense is faltering, since, sick as he is, he is still trying to get to his meeting at work. But what about his , moral sense? As a pitiless virus takes possession of his body, what does Joe do when he remembers that his dog Reebok, whom he loves, has no food? In this version of the story, Joe may barely have enough energy to go through with the plans he has already made, let alone be able to think quickly, prioritize on the spot, and redirect himself, as he does in the nonsick-Joe scenario. Feverish and queasy, now his emotional reaction to Reebok's distress is in direct competi, tion with his, own misery. Maybe conscience will still prevail. On the other hand, maybe Joe, weakened by illness, no longer possesses the complete strength of his convictions. Following the course of least resistance, maybe he will just keep driving and try to suffer through his original plans, and Reebok, though not altogether forgotten, will be relegated to an emotional back burner for a while. This is not really how we want to think about Joe, or about our selves, but it is interesting, and it is true: Our exalted sense of con science " the bringer of connection and meaning, can at times be significantly affected by something as totally irrelevant to right ver sus wrong, as unrelated to our moral sensibilities, as the flu-or a missed night's sleep, or a car crash, or a toothache. Normal con science never disappears, but when the body is weak, c;nscience can ?get very sleepy and unfocused. An assault to the'body is one' of two things-the other one being , , ' great fear-that elevate continued, wide-awake conscience to an :: heroic level in our eyes. If a person is acutely ill or seriously injured, ;:�'r afraid, and yet remains true to his or her emotional attachments, , �iwe think of that person as courageous. The classic example is the .
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frontline soldier who, though injured himself, rescues his comrade from enemy fire. That we insist on the concept of courage to de scribe such acts is our tacit ackriowledgment that the voice of con science is commonly outshouted by substantial pain or fear. And in order to care for Reebok, if Joe were to make an extra drive home even with a fever of 102, we might see his behavior as heroic in a mi nor way. We would do more than just smile at him sentimentally. We might want to pat him on the back. Another bodily- influence on conscience is, strangely enough, hormones.,To relate this impairment of conscience succinctly�ac cording to figures from the National Adoption Information Clearing house, 15 to 1 8 percent of recent, births in the United States were "unwanted by the mother" at the time of conception. It is fair to i;lS sume that some of these pregnancies resulted from ignorance or genuine accident, but to be sure, hundreds of thousands of brand new Americans are now living the insecure existence of unwanted children simply because a physica'i appetite eclipsed their p;���ts' - ' consCiences for just a few minutes in each case. When speaking of sexual pressures, we acknowledge how difficult . it can be to argue with our biological nature,' and we raise instances of sustained con science to the lofty designation of "virtue." Noteworthy is that, by this definition, . we are often more "virtuous" at forty than we were at twenty, and this "virtue" is achieved merely through aging. There are tragic biological subversions of conscience, as well. These include the various schizophrenic disorders that sometimes cause individuals to act ba'sed �n psychotic delusions. When the hu , man brain is impaired in tp,is way, "The voices told me to do it" is not a joke but a horrifying reality, and for the haunted soul whose psy ( chosis waxes and wanes over time, there is the possibility of "waking" from insanity to find that he has acted on a delusional · idea against his own conscience and will. Fortunately, the pressures our bodies bring to bear on conscience are fairly circumscribed. Outside of combat, situations in which we 54
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must make crucial moral decisions while we are severely injured do not happen to us every day, or even every year, and for most people, sexual enthrallment is similarly infrequent. Out-of-control paranoid schizophrenia is relatively rare. Even taken together, the biological limitations on our moral sense do not account for very much of the incomprehensibly bad behavior we can read about in our newspa pers or see on our televisions any hour of any day. Schizophrenics are unlikely to be qrganized terrorists. Toothaches do not cauSe hate crimes. Unprotected sex does not start wars. So what does? Moral Exclusion Each year on the Fourth of July, the little seaside New England town where I live lights it three-story celebratory bonfire on the beach. Pallets of dry wood are nailed together and artfully stacked on top of one another in a towerlike shape that dominates our quaint land scape for several days before the Fourth. The tower is constructed just,so, with enough planks of wood and enough space for airflow in between that it can be counted on to flame up quickly. It is ignited as dar\mess falls, with the volunteer fire department standing by, hoses at the ready, just in case; The atmosphere is festive. The band plays patriotic songs. There ar� hot dogs and Slurpees and a fire works display. When the bonfire has burned out completely, the chil dren return to the beach, where the firemen obligingly drench them with their hoses. All of this has been a town tradition for sixty years, but not being a big fan of massive fires, I have attended it only once, in 2002, j when I was encouraged by friends. I was amazed by the numbers of , i,people who had somehow pressed themselves into our tiny corner of '. the Atlantic coastline, some of them from fifty or more miles away, I and I jostled with the crowd to find a spot close enough to see the ,
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fire, but far enough away not to get 'fiy eyebrows singed, or so I thought. I had been warned that once the fire got gQing, there would be more heat than I could imagine, and it was already a ninety degree day. As the sun began to set, there were hoots and shouts and calls for the tower to be torched, and when flame was finally put to wood, there was a collective gasp. The fire immediately began to en gulf the wooden structure like the unstoppable force it was, from the sand upward to a night sky that suddenly blazed. And then came the heat. With the feel of a near-solid object, a wall of unbearable, even frightening �uperheated air rolled outward from the fire in waves of increasing intensity, taking the crowd by surprise and pushing us away en masse. Each time I thought I was far enough away, I had to move back another fifty yards, and then another fifty yards, and then another. My face hurt. I would never have dreamed that a bonfire could make that much heat, not even one that was three stories high. Once people had retreated to a sufficient distance, a sense . of happy fascination returned, and when the ornamental top of the tower was consumed by the fire, the crowd. applauded. The orna ment at the summit had been built to resemble a little house, and now the house contained a miniature inferno. This and the vague sense of danger and the heat all disturbed me somehow, and I could not seem to share the feeling of! a festive occasion. Instead, per versely, I began to think about the re�lity of the witch burnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth �enturies, .events I have always thought of as incomprehensible, and hot as I was, I shivered a little. It is one thing to read about a fire large enough to execute a human bein�. It is another thing to stand in front of such a fire, along with an excited, hooting crowd. The sinister historical associations would not leave me, and stubbornly kept me from taking any delight in the moment: I wondered: How had the witch burnings happened? How could such nightmares have been real? Ever the psychologist, I looked around at the people. Clearly, these were not bewildered Basque refugees in 1 6 10, frantically searching for diabolists to burn. Here -
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we were, a crowd of new-millennium, peace-loving, nonhysterical citizens, unscarred by hardship or menacing superstition. There was no blood lust here, or subjugation of conscience. There was laugh ter and neighborly feeling. We were eating hot dogs and drinking Slurpees and celebrating Independence Day. We were not a heart less, amoral mob, and we would by no means have rallied around a murder, let alone the staging of a torture. If by some bizarre reality warp there had suddenly · been a human figure writhing in those colossal flames, only the anonymous handful of sociopaths among us would have been unaffected or perhaps entertained. Of the rest, a few good people would have stared in paralyzed disbelief, a number of especially courageous people would have tried to intervene, and most of the crowd would have fled in understandable terror. And the once-cheerful bonfire would have become a traumatic image seared into all of our brains for the rest of our lives. But what if the burping human figure had been Osama bin Laden? How would this crowd of American nationals in 2002 have reacted if suddenly confronted with the public execution of the per son identified by them as the world's most despicable villain? Would these normally conscience-bound, churchgoing, nonviolent people have stood by and allowed it? Might there have been enthusiasm, or at least. acquiescence, rather than nausea and horror at the spectacle of a human being dying in agony? Standing there among all those good people, I suqdenly realized that the reaction might have been something less than horror, sim ply because Osama bin Laden is not a human being in our view. He is Osama, and as such, to borrow an expression from Ervin Staub in The Roots of Evil, he has be�n completely "excluded from our moral universe." The interventions of conscience no longer apply to him. He is not human . . He is an it. And unfortunately, this transformation of a man into an it makes him scarier as well. Sometimes people appear to deserve our moral exclusion of them, as terrorists appear to do. Other examples of its are war crim-
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inals, child abductors, and serial killers, and in each of these cases, a considered argument can be (and has been) made, rightly or wrongly, that certain rights to compassionate treatment have been forfeited. But in most cases, our tendency to reduce people to non beings is neither considered nor conscious, and throughout history our proclivity to dehumanize has too often been turned against the essentially innocent. The list of out groups that some portion of hu" mankind has at one time or another demoted to the status of hardly even human is extremely long and, ironically, includes categories for nearly every one -of us: blacks, Communists, capitalists, gays, Native Americans, Jews, foreigners, "witches," women, Muslims, Chris tians, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the poor, the rich, the Irish, the English, the Americans, the �inhalese, Tamils, Albanians, Croats, Serbs, Hutus, Tutsis, and Iraqis, to name but a few. And once the other group has become populated by its, anythin.g goes, especially if someone in authority gives the order. Conscience is no longer necessary, because conscience binds us to oth��i�gs · ;�d�t t; it; �c��sc;�;;;·�ti1r;;i;t;·:�;;y '-������-;��;YTxi�ting7011t · " it -�p£l���='.��1Yto my cotIDtrymen , rnyTiienQs, an:��fiTidr;;�, �ot ci;-rse, and� imy;;s. You ��;'";�a�d�-d-"{;;�;;y--mo;;r-; 1>ilnTfy' ....and maybe even praise from the others in my group-I"--can-.�<:''Y.:"5!��!'�"X?� fr?-�.l'���""����L.?�_��U
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I should record that nothing bad actually happened at the bon fire in 2002. As far as I know, these macabre thoughts occurred only to me. The flames consumed only wood. The fire was a sight to be hold, and then burned itself out, just as planned. Laughing children, safe in their hometown, romped on the beach and got doused by the firemen. One wishes that human gatherings could always be as peaceful.
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The Emperor's New Clothes
When conscience falls into a profound trance, when it sleeps through acts of torture, war, and genocide, political leaders and other prominent individuals can make the difference between a gradual reawakening of our seventh sense and a continued amoral nightmare. History teaches that attitudes and plans 'Coming from the top dealing pragmatically with problems of hardship and insecurity in the group, rather than scapegoating an out group, can help us re" turn to a more realistic view of the "others." In time, moral leader ship can make a difference. But history shows us also that a leader with no seventh sense can hypnotize the group conscience still fur ther, redoubling catastrophe. Using fear-based propaganda to am plify a destructive ideology, such a leader can bring the members of a frightened society to see the its as the sole impediment to the good life, for themselves and maybe even for humanity as a whole, and the conflict as an epic battle between good and evil. Once these beliefs have been disseminated, crushing the its without pity or conscience , can, with chilling ease, become an incontrovertible mandate. The recurrence throughout history of this second type of leader raises a long list of dumbfounding questions. Why does the human race tolerate this sorrowful story over and over, like a mindless bro ken record? Why do we continue to allow I�AS;l�rs W"hQ.!11'_��m91iyated by self-interest;'or' 15y' 1fierr o;n" p;yZh�10gical issues from th� . �--;;:."" to' lin' blHemess aiid -politica:rcrlslS'·Tnto-'arffiedconf;;tI�·;a rC;;;t ;.d � " war? In the worst instances, why do we let people who think like �. ; . frog-killing, arm-breaking Skip run the show and play games of dominance with other people's lives? What becomes of our individual consciences? Why do we not stand up for what we feel? One explanation is our trancelike state, which lets us believe that . . the ones who are dying are only its anyway. And there is fear, of ..
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course-always-and often a sense of helplessness. We look around at the crowd and we think to ourselves, Too many are against me, or . I don't hear any other people protesting this, or, even more re signedly, That's just the way the world is, or That's politics. All of these feelings and beliefs can significantly mute our moral sense, but where the disabling of conscience by authority is concerned, there is som�thing even more effective, something more elemental than ob jectifying the "others," more cloying and miserable than a sense of helplessness, and evidently more difficult to conquer than fear itself. Very simply, we are programmed to obey authority even ag�inst our own conscience�.
In 196 1 and 1962, in New Haven, Connecticut, yale University professor Stanley Milgram designed and filmed one of the most as tonishing psychological experiments ever conducted. Milgram set out to pit the human tendency to obey authority as squarely as pos sible against i�';&vidual conscience. C�ncerning his method otin quiry, he wrote, "Of all moral principles, the one that comes closest to being universally accepted is this: one should not inflict suffering on a helpless person who is neither harmful nor threatening to one self. This principle is the counterforce we shall set in opposition to obedience." Milgram's experimental procedure was relentlessly straightfor ward, and the filmed version of his study has outraged humanists, , and unsuspecting college students, for forty years. In the study, two men, strangers to each other, arrive at a psychology laboratory to participate in an experiment that has been advertised as having to do with memory and learning. Participation is rewarded with four dollars, plus fifty cents for carfare. At the lab" the experimenter (Stanley 'Milgram himself, in the filmed version} explains to both men that the study concerns "the effects of punishment on learning." One of the two is designated as the "learner" and is 'escorted into an other room and seated in a chair. All watch as the leamer's arms are mc;ltter-of-f�ctly strapped to the chair, "to prevent excessive move-
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ment," and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he must lea,rn a list of word pairs (blue box, nice day, wild duck, etc.) , and that whenever he makes a mistake, he will receive an electric shock. �h each mistake, the shock will increase in intensity. The other person is told that he is to be the "teacher" in this learning experiment. After the teacher has watched the learner get strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock, the teacher is taken into a different room and asked to take a seat in front of a large, omi nous machine called a "shock generator." The shock generator has thirty switches, arranged horizontally and labeled by "volts," from 15 volts all the way to 450 volts, in IS-volt increments. In addition to the numbers, the switches are branded with descriptors that range from SLIGHT SHOCK to the sinister appellation of DANGER---'SEVERE SHOCK. The teacher is handed the list of word pairs and told that his job is to administer a test to the learner in the other room. When the learner gets an answer right-for example, teacher calls out "blue," and learner answers "box"-the teacher can move on to the next test item. But when the learner gives an incorrect answer, the teacher must push a switch and give him an electric shock. The experimenter instructs the teacher to begin at the lowest level of shock on the shock generator, and with each wrong answer, to increase the shock level by one increment. The le�rner in the other room is actually the experimenter's trained confederate, an actor, and will receive no shocks at all. But of course the teacher does not know this, and it is the teacher who is the real subject of the experiment. The teacher calls out the first few items of the "learning test," and then trouble begins, because the learner-Milgram's accomplice, unseen in the other room-starts to sound very uncomfortable. At 75 volts, the learner makes a mistake on the word pair, the teacher administers the shock, and the learner grunts. At 120 volts, the learner shouts · to the experimenter that the shocks are becoming painful, and at 150 volts, the unseen learner demands to be released -
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from the experiment. AS the shocks ' get stronger, the leamer's p'rotests sound more and �6re desperate, and at 285 volts, he emits an agonized scream. The experimenter-the Yale professor in the white lab coat-stands behind the teacher, who is seated at the shock generator, and calmly gives a sequence of scripted prods, such , ,as "Please continue," or' ''The experiment requires that you con tinue," or ''Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on." Milgram repeated this procedure forty times using forty different , subjects-people who were "in everyday life responsible and de cent"-including high school teachers, postal clerks, salesmen, manual laborers, and engineers. The forty represented various edu cational levels, from one man who had not finished high school to others who had doctoral or other professional degrees. The aim of the experiment was to discover how long the subjects (the teachers in this experiment) would take to disobey Milgram's authority when presented with a' clear moral imperative. How much electric shock would they administer to a pleading, screaming stranger merely be qmse an authority figure told them to do so? When I show Milgram's film to a lecture hall full of psychology students, I ask them to predict the answers to these questions. The students are always certain that conscience will prevail. Many of them predict that a large number of the subjects will walk out of the experiment as soon as they find out about the use of electric shock. Most of the students are sure that, of the subjects who �ema:in, all but a few will defy the experimenter, perhaps telling him to go to hell, at least by the time the man in the other room demands to be freed (at 150 volts). And cif course, the students predict, onLy a tiny number of very: sick, sadistiC subjects will continue pushing switches all the way to 450 volts, where the machine itself says DANGER SEVERE SHOCK.
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He're is what a2tually happens: ThirtY-four of Milgram':> original forty subjects continue to shock th;k�!il;�,,_wh�m: th�y i£�ii� to be . --- -. ... �
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strapped to a chair, even after he asks to be released from the ex 'periment. In fact, of these thirty-four subjects, twenty-five-that is to say, 62.5 percent of the total group--n�ver disobey the experi menter at any point, continuing to press the switches all the way to . the end of the sequence (450 volts) despite entreaties and shrieks from the man in the other room. The teachers sweat, they complain, they hold their heads, but they continue. When the film is over, I watch the clock. In a lecture hall full of students who have just seen this experiment for the first time, there is always stunned silence for , at least one full minute. After the original experiment, Milgram varied his design in a number of ways. In one variation, for example, subjects were not commanded to operate the switches ,that shocked the learner, only to call out the words for the worQ.-pair test before another person pushed the switches. In this version of the experiment, thirty-seven of forty people (92,5 percent) cont\nued to participate to the high. est shock level on the "generator." 'rhus far, the teachers in the study had been only men. Milgram now tried his experiment using forty women, speculating that women might be more empathic. Their per formance was virtually identical, except that obedient women re , E0rted �ore s!�e ss !�aE ��e.?ien�_ men. Stud�� u;ing the Milgram . _ _ _ , model were repeated at several other universities, and soon involved mor.: than a thousand subjects of both genders and from many walks 'of life. The results rem�ined essentially the same. The many-times-replicated outcome of his obedience study led ' . Milgram to make the famous pronouncement that has haunted, and also motivated, so many students of human nature: "A substantial 1 proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the I A content of t�e �=t a�d w��h?�t li���ations ,o.t cOllsc:i�llce, so long as , , , the , , command comes from a legitimate authority." " they perceive that J ' '" , Milgram belie�ed that �uth�ritY �o�id p�t- c���-Zi;���- -t�- sl��p' mainly because the obedie�t person ma�es �n ''adjustment 'of' , thought," which is to see himself as not responsib le for his own actio�;:
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In', his mind, he is no longer a person who must ac� in a morally accountable way, but the agent of an external authority to whom he " attribut�.� · all respoFlsibility and ail initiative. This" "adjustment of thought"'makes it much �asier for benign leadership to establish or der and control, but by the same psychological mechanism, it has countless times rolled out the red carpet for self-serving, malevolent, and sociopathk "authorities." , Where Conscience Draws the Line
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The extent to which authority dulls conscience is affected by the per ceived legitimacy of that authority. If the person giving the orders is seen as a subordinate, or even as an equal, the same "adjustment of thought" may never occur. In Milgram's initial study, one of the mi nority of people who eventually refused to continue with the experi ment was a thirty-two-year-old engineer who apparently regarded the scientist in the lab cop.t as, at most, his intellectual peer. This subject pushed his chair (!,way from the shock generator and in an indignant tone said to Milgram, 'Tm an electrical engineer, and I have had shocks . . . I think I've gone too far'already, probably." In an interview later, when Milgram asked him who was a<:,countabte for sho�king the , _man in the other room, he did n�t assign any respo�sibility to the ex perimenter. Instead, he replied, "I would ' Rut it on myself entirely." He was a professional person with an ad�a���d e ci���ti��;- ��d-�du cation must be , acknowledged as one of the factors that determine wh¢ther or not conscience s1:ays alert. It would be (!, grave ahd 'arrogant mistake to imagine th�t an' acad�mic degree directly increases the strength of cons�ience in the human psyche. On the other hand, education can sometimes level the perceived legitimacy of an author ity figure, and thereby limit unquestioning obedience. With educa tion and ' knowledge-, the individual may be able to hold on to the perception of him- or herself as a leg;,itimate authority.
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,
Relatedly, in another permutation of his experiment, Milgram posed an "ordinary man," rather than a scientist, as the perso� who . ordered the su-bjects to ad�inister shocks .. When an "ordinary man". 1� was in charg£' instead o{a man in a white lab coat, obedience on the .; part of the subjects dropped from 62.5 percent to 20 percent. \1, fackaging and perceptions are not everything, but evidently they get ' . pretty close. Some of us may resist a person who looks like we do, but most of us will obey someone who looks, like an authority. This , , finding is of particular concern in an age when our leaders and ex perts ,come to us via the magic of television, where nearly anyone can , be made to appear patrician and commandingly larger than life. In addition to being larger than life, images on television are up . close and personal-they are in our living rooms-and another fac, tor that affects authority's power to overwhelm individual conscience is the proximity of the person giving the commands. When Milgram varied his experiment such that he was not in the room; obedience dropped by two-thirds, to about the same ·level as when an "ordinary man" was in charge. And when authot:ity was not close by, subjects tended to "cheat" by using onry the lower shock levels on the ma. ' chine. The nearness of authority is especially relevant to the real-life obe dience requirements of combat and war. As it turns out, individ ual conscience draws a surprisingly firm line at killing-surprising for those who think of human beings as natural war makers. This aspect of conscience is so resilient in normal people that military psycholo gists have needed to devise ways around it. For example, military ex- I perts noW know that to make men kill with any kind of reliability, commands must be given by authorities who are present with the troops. Otherwise, the men in the field will tend to "cheat" on their orders to kill, will intentionally misaim or simply fail to fire, to keep from violating this mightiest proscription of conscience. Brig. Gen. S. L. A Marshall was a United States combat histo rian in the Pacific theater during World War II and later became the -
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official historian of the European theater of operations. He wrote of many World War II incidents in which almost all soldiers obeyed and fired their weapons while their leaders were present to command them, but when the leaders left, the firing rate dropped immediately to between 15 and 20 percent. Marshall believed that the great re lief displayed by soldiers in a sector where they were not being di rectly ordered to fire "was due not so much to the realization that things were safer there as to the blessed knowledge that for a time they were not under the compulsion to take life. " In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, former u.s. Army Ranger and paratrooper Lt. CoL Dave Grossman reviews Marshall's observations, along with the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law-enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and observations of nonfiring from a long list of wars, including the American Civil. War, World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, and the Falklands War. He concludes that "the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be 'conscientious objectors.' " Mter weighing the considerable historical evidence that ground soldiers often resist and quietly sab otage opportunities to kill, Grossman comes to a "novel and reas suring conclusion about the nature of man: despite an unbroken . .� tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer." To suf3,l�" vert the bottom line of conscience, to be able to thrust a bayonet or pull a trigger to kill a stranger, normal human beings must be care fully taught, psychologically conditioned, and commanded by au thorities on the battlefield. Also, it helps to encourage moral exclusion, to remind the troops that the enemy soldiers are nothing but its, Krauts, slants, gooks. As Peter Watson writes in War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psycho logy, "the stupidity of local customs is ridiculed," and "local pe.rsop.alities ate presented as evil demigods. " On and off the battlefield, for both the troops and the people 66
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back home, the particular war being fought must be portrayed as a , . crucial or even a sacred struggle between good and eVil, which is. ex , actly the message that authorities-on all sides of the conflict-have . tried to convey during every major war in history. For example, ' , though it is now difficult to remember anything but the moral out, . rage that exploded during the final phases of the. Vietnam War, as ' that war began, Americans were repeatedly assured that they and only they could save the South Vietnamese people from a future of terror and enslavement. Speeches by leaders during wartime, in modem times broadcasted into our living rooms, have always pushed hard o� this theme of an absolutely necessary mission, the high call ing that justifies the killing. And paradoxically, authority can more " readily project this take on reality for the very reason that conscience ,,' ' cherishes a high calling and a sense of membership in the right minded group. In other words, conscience can be tricked, and when . it comes to killing strangers, trickery is usually required. That psychology can provide the military with techniques to make killers out of nonkillers, and that the military is , using these procedures, is dispiriting news. But behind the bad news is a parti cle of hope that glints like a diamond in a sea of darkness. We are beginning to learn that human beings are not the natural killing ma chines we have at times believed ourselves to be. Even under the " desperate pressures of combat, we have often left our weapons unfired, or taken poor aim, for when it was not silenced under the bell jar of authority, there was always an outcry from our human con nectedness-there has always been the voice of conscience-re minding us that we must not kill. Because its essence is killing, war is the ultimate contest between conscience and authority. Our seventh sense , demands that we not take life, and when authority overrules conscience and a soldier is in duced to kill in combat, he is very likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder immediately and for the remainder of his life, along with the depression, divorces, addictions, ulcers, and heart disease �
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that attend traumatic memory. In contrast, research involving Vietnam veterans has shown that soldiers who are not placed in sit uations where they are forced to kill are no more likely to develop the symptoms of PTSD than are those who spend their entire en listment at home. This crippling competition between our moral sense and our au thority figures has gone on almost unceasingly since human beings began to live in hierarchical societies, for the past five thousand years during which a -king or a land-hungry nobleman, or the leader of a state or a nation could order less powerful individuals to enter a battle and kill. And apparently it is a struggle of conscience that will not be resolved in our children's or our grandchildren's lifetimes. Obedience 6, Conscience 4
Stanley Milgram, who demonstrated that at least six out of ten peo ple will tend to obey to the bitter end an official-looking authority who is physically present, pointed out that people who disobey de structive authority suffer psychologically, too. Often a person who disobeys finds himself at odds with the social order, and may fit;td it hard to shake the feeling that he has been faithless to someone or something to whom he pledged allegiance. Obedience is passive, and it is only the disobedient one who must bear the "burden of his action," to use Milgram's words. If courage is acting according to , one's conscience despite pain or fear, then strength is the ability to keep conscience awake and in force despite the demands of author ities to do otherwise. And strength is important, because in championing the various causes of conscience, the odds are against us. To illustrate, I propose an imaginary society of exactly one hun dred adults, in a group that conforms precisely to known statistic�. This means that of the one hundred people in my hypothetical soci-
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ety, four are sociopathic-they have no conscience. Of the remain ing ninety-six decent citizens, all of whom do have consciences, 62.5 , percent will obey authority more or less without question, quite pos sibly the authority of one of the more aggressive and controlling so ciopaths in the crowd. This leaves thirty-six people who have both conscience and the strength to bear the burdens of their actions, a little more than a third of the group. These are not impossible odds, '\ but they are not easy ones, either. And there is yet another challenge for the conscience-bound, . which is that, strange as it seems, most of the sociopaths are invisi ble. Let us tum to that dilemma now, and the remarkable case of Doreen Littlefield.
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I saw a werewolf drinking a piiia colada at Trader Vics His hair was perfect -Wa rren Zevon
oreen glances in the rearview mirror and wishes for the bil
D lionth time that she were beautiful. Life would be so much eas
ier. She appears pretty in the mirror this morning, rested and with all of her makeup on, but she knows that if she were not so skilled with the cosmetics, or if she were tired, she would look quite plain. She would look plain like the unsophisticated girl from the sticks that she was, ,more as if she belonged milking a cow than in the driver's seat of this black BMW. She is only thirty-four, and her skin still looks good, no lines yet, a little pale maybe. But her nose is slightly pointed, enough to. be noticeable, and her straw-colored hair, her most problematic feature, stays dry and frizzled no matter what she does to it. Luckily, her body is excellent. She looks away from the mirror and down at her light gray silk suit, conservative but formfit ting. Doreen's body is good, and even better, she knows just how to move. For a woman with a plain face, she is incredibly seductive.
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; When she walks across a room, all the men in it watch .. Remem I;. bering this, she smiles and starts the car. About a mile from her apartment, she realizes that she forgot to feed the damn Maltese. Oh well. The stupid froufrou dog will man age to survive until she gets home from work tonight. At this point, a month after the impulse purchase, she cannot believe she ever bought it anyway. She had thought she would look elegant when she walked it, but walking it turned out to be tedious. When she can find , . the time, she will have to get it put to sleep, or maybe she can sell it to someone. It was expensive, after all. In her parking area on the sprawling grounds of the psychiatric . ' hospital, she makes sure to park her car beside Jenna's rusted-out Escort, a convenient visual comparison to remind Jenna of their relative places in the world. One more glance in the mirror and then Doreen picks up her briefcase, stuffed to overflowing to make it , clear how hard she works, and walks up the stairs to the suite of of I fices above the ward. As she passes through the waiting room, she flashes a "We're good buddies" smile at Ivy, the frumpy secretary receptionist for the unit, and Ivy immediately brightens. "Good morning, Dr. Littlefield. Oh my goodness; I love your suit! It's just gorgeous!" "Why, thank you, Ivy. I can always count on you to put me in a good mood," Doreen replies with another big smile. "Buzz rpe when • my patient gets here, would you?" Doreen disappears into her office, and Ivy shakes her head and says out loud to an empty waiting room, "That has got to be the nicest person in the world." It is early, not quite eight o'clock, .and in her office Doreen goes t,o the window to watch her colleagues arrive. She sees Jackie Rubenstein walking toward the building, with her long legs and her effortless posture. Jackie is from Los Angeles, even-tempered and funny, and her beautiful olive skin makes her look, always, as if she ·
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just got back from a wonderful vacation. She is . brilliant as well, a great deal smarter than Doreen, and for this reason even more than the others, Doreen secretly despises her. In fact, she hates her so much�that she would kill her if she thought she could get away with ,/ it )htit she knows she would eventually get caught. Doreen and Jackie were postdocs together at the hospital eight years ago, be came friends, at least in Jackie's eyes, and now Doreen is hearing ru mors that Jackie may receive the Mentor of the Year Award. They are the same age. How can Jackie possibly win an award for being a "mentor" at the age of thirty-four? From the lawn, Jackie Rubenstein looks up and notices Doreen in the office window. She waves. Doreen smiles girlishly and waves back. At this moment, Ivy buzzes Doreen for her first patient of the day, a stunningly handsome, broad-shouldered, but very frightened looking young man named Dennis. In hospital lingo, Dennis is a VIP (very important patient), because he is the nephew of a famous na tional politician. In this major teaching hospital, there are a number of such VIPs, celebrities, the wealthy, family members of people whose names are household words. Dennis is not one of Doreen's psychotherapy patients. Rather, Doreen is his administrator, which means that she meets with him twice a week to inquire how his treat ment is going, to make sure the paperwork is done, and to approve his discharge from the hospital when the time comes. Doreen has al ready heard from the staff that today Dennis will want to discuss his release. He thinks he has gotten better enough to go home. To separate the administrative tasks from the psychotherapeutic ones is hospital policy. Each patient has both an administrator and a therapist. Dennis's therapist, whom he worships, is the talented Dr. Jackie Rubenstein. Yesterday, Jackie told Doreen that her patient Dennis was tremendously improved, and that she plans to take him on as an outpatient when he leaves the hospital. Now Dennis sits in one of the low chairs in Doreen Littlefield's "
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office and tries to make eye contact, as he knows he should if he is going to appear well enough to go home from the hospital. But he has a hard time and keeps looking away. Something about her gray suit scares him, and something about her eyes. Still, he likes her, he thinks. She has always been extremely nice to him, and other people have told him that of all the doctors, Dr. Littlefield is the one who is most interested in the patients. Anyway, she is the expert. Doreen, seated behind her desk, looks at Dennis and marvels again at the perfect lines of his face and his muscular twenty-six year-old body. She wonders how much money he will end up inher iting. But then she remembers her mission, and tries to lock in his nervous gaze with a maternal smile. "I hear you've been feeling much better this week, Dennis." "That's right, Dr. Littlefield. I've been feeling much better this , week. Really, a whole lot better. My ideas are much better. They're not bothering me all the time like they were when I came in." "Why do you think that is, Dennis? Why do you think they're not bothering you anymore?" "Oh, well, I've really been working hard on the cognitive therapy " techniques Dr. Rubenstein taught me, you know? They're okay. I I , mean, they help. And . . . Well, the thing is, I think I'm ready to go home now. Or soon maybe? Dr. Rubenstein said she could keep see ing me as an outpatient." Dennis's "ideas, " the ones that are not bothering him so much at present, are the paranoid delusions that completely take over his life fro� time to time; Once a vibrant teenager who made stellar grades and was the champion of his high school lacrosse team, Dennis suf fered a psychotic breakdown during his freshman year in college and was hospitalized. In the seven years since then, he has been in and out of psychiatric facilities as his delusions waxed and waned but neVer really left him. When these terrifying "ideas" have him in their grip, he believes that people are trying to kill him and lying about their intentions, that the streetlights are monitoring his thoughts for -
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the CIA, that every passing car contains an agent who has been sent to abduct and question him for crimes that he cannot remember. His sense of reality is fragile in the extreme, and the torment of his suspiciousness, which is present even when the concrete delusions are in remission, makes it increasingly difficult for him to be around other people, even therapists. Jackie Rubenstein has done an almost miraculous job of forging a therapeutic relationship with this lonely young man who trusts no one. "You say Dr; Rubenstein said you could be discharged, and that she'd see you as an outpatient?" "Yes. Yes, that was what she suggested. I mean, she agreed that I was almost ready to go hoine." "Really?" Doreen looks at Dennis with a puzzled expression on her face, as if expecting some clarification. "That's not what she told me." There is a long pause, during which Dennis shudders visibly. Finally, he asks, "What do you mean?" Doreen emits a stage sigh, full of compassion, and comes out from behind her desk to sit in the chair beside Dennis's. She tries to put her hand on his shoulder, but he pulls his body away from her, as if she were about to strike him. Staring out the window as far into the distance as he can, he repeats his question, "What do you mean that's not what she told you?" Doreen understands enough about paranoid schizophrenia to know that Dennis already suspects this is going to be news of treach ery on the part of Dr. Rubenstein, the person he thought was his only real friend in the world. "What Dr. Rubenstein told me was that she was sure you were much sicker now than when you came in. And as for outpatient ther apy, she made it very clear that she'd never agree to see you outside of the hospital. She said you were much too dangerous." Even to Doreen, it is apparent that something in Dennis's heart
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is £lying out of the window and away, not to return to him anytime soon. She says, "Dennis? Dennis, are you okay?" Dennis does not move or speak. She tries again. ''I'm so sorry I had to be the one to tell you this. Dennis? I'm sure it was just a misunderstanding. You know Dr. , Rube,nstein would never lie to you." But Dennis is silent. He has to cope with the fear of betrayal every minute of his life, but this huge new wave of it, coming from , ' his wonderful Dr. Rubenstein, has blindsided him and made him stone-still, like a statue. When Doreen realizes that he really is not going to respond at all, she goes to the phone and calls for assistance. In no time, two burly mental health workers appear at her office door. They are big, but she is the authority, and they will obey her orders without ques tion. Thinking this gives her a little shiver of pleasure, but wear ing her gravest expression, she signs the order to board Dennis. "Boarding"-a euphemism that makes it sound like the hospital is putting someone up at an inn-means that a patient is transferred from an unlocked ward, such as the one Dennis has been in, to a locked Ul'l;it with greater security. Patients are boarded if they be come violent, or when, like Dennis, they have had a serious relapse. , If necessary, they are restrained and remedicated. Doreen is fairly certain that Dennis will not tell anyone about what she has just said to him. Dennis does not tell his secrets. He is too paranoid. But even if he does tell someone, he will not be be lieved. No one ever believes the patients over the doctors. And from what she just saw, he will be out of it for quite a long time, and not really talking about anything. With a rush of satisfaction, she realizes that Jackie Rubenstein has just lost herself one truly delectable VIP patient. He will be wildly paranoid about Jackie now, and the best part is that Jackie will blame herself, will think she missed something important in her therapy with him, or said something harmful. Jacki<::
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is such a loser about things like that. She will actually take the rap, and then she will hand the patient off to another therapist. So much for all the talk around the hospital about Dr. Rubenste.in being a mir acle worker.
Blue Smoke
and
Mirrors
Doreen Littlefield is what personality theorist Theodore Millon would call a "covetous psychopath," where "psychopath" refers to sociopathy, or the absence of conscience, and "covetous" has its usual referent: an inordinate desire for the possessions of others. So ciopaths do not always have a covetous . nature-some a�e very dif ferently motiva.ted-but when lack of conscience and covetousness occur together in the same individual, a fascinating and frightening picture emerges. Since it is simply not possible to steal and have for oneself the most valuable "possessions" of another person-beauty, intelligence, success, a strong character-the covetous sociopath set�_�es for besmirching or damaging enviable qualities in others so that they will not have them, either, or at least not be able to enjoy them I so much. As Millon says, "Here, the pleasure lies in taking Jather -than in having." /" The covetous sociopath thinks that life has cheated her some how, has not given her nearly the same bounty as other people, and so she must even the existential score by robbing people, by secretly causing destruction in other lives. She believes she has be�n slighted ," by nature, circumstances, and destiny, and that diminishing _oj:,her � �" .Eer only means of being .powerful. Retribution, usually against"-people- ;ho- h �ve-r;� id�a-that 'they'have �een targeted, is the most important activity in the covetous sociopath's life, her highest priority. Since this clandestine power game is priority n�mber one, all of the covetous sociopath's deceitfulness and tolerance for risk are de,-
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\roted to it. For the sake of the game, she may devise schemes and acts that most of us would consider outrageous and poten ,. tially self-destructive, in addition to crueL And yet when such a per " son is around 'us in our lives, even on a daily basis, we are often oblivious to her activities. We do. not expect to see a person direct a " • dangerous, vicious vendetta against someone who in most cases has ' clone nothing to hurt or offend her. We do not expect it, and so we do not see it, even when it happens to someone we know-or to us l"'
}JJ.1Q1JlY. The actions taken by the covetous sociopath are often so . ,' .outlandish, and so gratuitously mean, that we refuse to believe they . " .were intentional, or even that they happened at all. In this way, her true nature it; usually invisible to the group. She can easily hide in i" plain sight, as Doreen has done among genuinely intelligent, profes sional people at the hospital for nearly a decade. The covetous sociopath is the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing, i ,and in Doreen's case, the disguise is especially elaborate. Doreen is a psychologist, or, at any rate, everyone at the hospital believes she , is a psychologist, which for Doreen Littlefield's purposes is much the . " , same thing. The truth, should anyone ever discover it, is that she has license, nor does she have a doctoral degree. When ' i'uTPn,tu"_two, she diJ��cei;�'a-<:bachef;�� d� g�e� i� ;�ychology from her state university back home, but that is all. The rest is . an extravagant charade. When they hired her as a postdoc at the hos I pital, they checked her references, but these were both very prominent men who had succumbed to certain embarrassing liaisons with her, though they should have known better. The hiting committee did not check the credentials she listed. Because she came so presti f giously recommended, they simply assumed she had a Ph.D. Ater all, who on earth would lie about a thing like that? As for her ability , , to behave like a psychologist well enough to fool the professionals and the patients, Doreen has always felt, and apparently she is borne , out in this opinion, that a person can learn a lot by reading books. Doreen has just seen her recovering eight o'clock patient, drop·
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kicked him into an acutely paranoid state as retribution against an innocent colleague, and sent him off to be medicated and confined to a locked unit. What does she do for the remainder of the day? If we were to rejoin her in her office, we would find that she calmly meets with the rest of her scheduled patients, makes phone calls, does paperwork, and goes to a staff meeting. We would probably not see anything out of the ordinary. Most of her behavior would look normal to us, or close enough to pass. Perhaps she does not do her patients very much.good, but she does them no obvious harm either, except in those instances, like this morning, when manipulating a patient will serve to damage a colleague she has targeted. Why would she direct her skills against psychiatric inpatients? They have nothing she wants. They are disenfranchised by the world, and she can feel powerful merely by sitting in a room with them. The exception might be the occasional female patient who is a little too attractive or, worse, a little too smart. Then Doreen might have to bring her down a peg or two, tweak a bit of the self-hatred that is usually already there in these patients. In her role as a psychothera pist, she finds this ridiculously easy to do. The setup is always one on-one, and the patient never understands what hit her well enough to complain to anyone outside of the therapy room. But when people do not provoke in Doreen a desire for some thing they have, or for something they are, then she does not target them. To the contrary, she may be especially charming and courte ous when she believes that certain underlings, as she. thinks of them, are useful in maintaining her sheep's-clothing disguise, a disguise that includes a presentation of herself as an extraordinarily nice, car ing, responsible, and pitiably overworked person. For example, when Doreen is preparing to leave work on the day she has secretly sabo taged Jackie Rubenstein and Dennis, she makes sure to stop by Ivy's desk for an endellring little chat. She tries to do this every evening. Ivy is the secretary-receptionist for the professionals on the ward,
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and one never knows when such a strategically placed person may come in handy. Doreen comes out of her office, collapses into one of the recep tion room chairs, and says, "Oh Ivy! I'm so grateful this day is over!" Ivy is twenty years older than Doreen. She is overweight and wears big plastic earrings. Doreen thinks she is pathetic. Ivy replies to her warmly, "I know. You poor thing. And that poor ' :" Dennis! I'm no doctor, but I do see the patients around, 'you know, , ! and I sort of had my hopes up . . . . I guess I was wrong." "No, no. You're very observant. He did seem better for a while. This work breaks your heart sometimes. " O f course, this morning the two no-nonsense attendants carrying Dennis off the ward passed right in front of a wide-eyed Ivy. She now . looks at Doreen with concern. "You know, Dr. Littlefield, I worry about you." As Ivy makes this confession, she notices that Doreen's eyes are 'pooling with tears, and she continues in a lower voice, "Oh my, to day was terrible for you, wasn't it, dear? I hope you won't think I'm , getting too personal, but you're so sensitive to be doing this kind of , ' work." "No, no, Ivy, I'm just tired, and of course I'm sad about Dennis. Don't tell anyone-I'm not supposed to play favorites-but he's spe cial to me, you know? I wish I could just go home and get a good night's sleep. " "Well, that's exactly what you should do, dear." "I wish I could, but what with the emergency and all, I didn't get my paperwork done, and I think I'm going to be up half the night do ing it." Ivy glances at Doreen's bulging briefcase and says, "You poor thing. Let's think of something nice, maybe, to get your mind off . . . ', ' well, what happened today. How's that new Maltese doggy of yours?" Doreen blots her eyes .with the back of her hand and' smiles. "Oh,
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he's terrific, Ivy. Actually, sometimes he's so cute I could just eat him up." Ivy chuckles. "Well then, I'll bet he's waiting for you. Why don't you go on home now and give him a great big hug?" "Better not be too big. I'll squish him. He's teeny." The two women laugh together over this, and then Doreen says, "Ivy, Ivy. You know, I think you should be the psychologist. You al ways know how to put me in a better mood. I'll see you bright and early tomorrow, okay? We'll just keep on keeping on, I guess." ''I'll be here, " affirms Ivy. She beams as Doreen picks up her briefcase and walks away, listing a bit to the briefcase side. Doreen walks back to the lot where she left her car, and there she encounters jenna, owner of the beat-up Escort she parked beside this morning. Jenna is a new intern at the hospital, and, unlike Ivy the receptionist, she is young, bright, and pretty. She has long, lovely, stick-straight auburn hair, and Doreen has targeted her. "Hello, Jenna. Going home?" Jenna blinks at the obvious question, which she thinks is proba bly criticism, since interns are expected to work slavishly long hours. But she recoups. "Yeah. Yes. Going home. You, too?" Doreen looks concerned. "What about that emergency confer ence at Chatwin Ham" Chatwin Hall houses a ward directed by the stern and fearsome Dr. Thomas Larson, whom Doreen knows to be Jenna's primary su pervisor. There is, of course, no conference there right now. Doreen has made this up on the spot. Jenna turns ashen immediately. "There's an emergency confer ence? Nobody told me. When? Why? Do you know?" Doreen, now taking on the demeanor df a schoolmarm, looks at ' her watch and says, "About ten minutes ago, I believe. Didn't you pick up your phone messages?" "Yes, of course I did, but there really wasn't anything about a conference. Dr. Larson's office?" -
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"I suppose." "Oh no. Oh my God. I've got to . . . I should . . . Well, 1 guess I'll just get there as fast as 1 can." "Good idea." Jenna is too panicked to wonder why Dr. Littlefield knows about a spur-of-the-moment conference that does not even involve her. The young intern dashes out of the parking lot and begins to run in her leather pumps across an acre of rain-soaked hospital. lawn. Doreen stands in the parking lot and watches her go until, still sprinting, she makes a turn around the fat side of a building and dis appears from view. Reflecting in satisfaction that Chatwin Hall is lo cated on the extreme opposite end of the grounds, Doreen gets into the BMW, checks her makeup in the rearview mirror, and starts for home. Tomorrow, 'or the next day, she will come across Jenna again, and Jenna will ask her about the conference that did not exist. Doreen will just shrug and look hard into Jenna's soft eyes, and Jenna will back off.
Sociopathy Versus Criminality
Doreen Littlefield will never be prosecuted for her deeds, including practicing psychology without a license. Dennis's influential uncle will never discover who she really is, nor will most of her other pa tients or their families. The professionals at the hospital will never pursue her legally for her criminal deception of them. She will never be punished in anything like a commensurate way for the countless psychological assaults she commits. In the end, she is a good illus tration of the difference between a sociopath and a criminal, which is, astoundingly, the sametIiing that separates anaughtyth�-year old girl who is se�n as well behaved from one who is scolded for tak ing candy from her mother's purse. The difference, quite simply, is whether or .not she gets caught. . �-......-..-, .. �- �-.--�.-..-----.-
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And ,adults getting caught for committing acts without con s<;ience is apparently more the exception than the rule, Since 4 per cent of the entire population is sociopathic, one might reasonably think that our prison system is filled to overflowing with sociopaths, to the exclusion of other types of people. But this is not �he case. According to Robert Hare and other researchers who test convicts, on average only about 20 percent of prison inmates in the United States are soc1O'paibs':'Harearia others�arecarefU['to-�t�thatthis ---20 percent ,of the prison pOJ;>ulation accounts for more than 50 per"' c�t-;;Tth�7.;�; s;;;��� ��i�e; ;; ( �rt�rti��, ' ��ecf robbeiy, 'k1dnapping:-mu;d;;:��ri�e�ainst the state (treason, espionage, terrorism), but the actual sociopathic head count in prisons, for both men and women, is only about two in ten. Put differently� most identified criminals are not sociopaths. Rather, they are people with more normal underlying personalities whose behavior is the product of negative social forces such as the drug culture:7hild �b�-se,-
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of guilt. But first, let us return to the hospital once more, this time -to see Dr. Jackie Rubenstein's miracle, two miracles in fact. It is now four days after Dennis was boarded to a locked unit, it Sunday, and the hospital grounds are empty except fof ' a small · car that travels up the narrow drive to Dennis's building and stops by the front door. Dr. Rubenstein steps out and digs in her coat pocket for the tremendous, almost medieval master key that will let her both in and out of the three-story stone building. Even now, after eight years of work at the hospital, she clutches the heavy passkey in her hand, . rather than putting it back in her pocket, after she enters a unit like this one and hears the door lock behind her. She has come to try, one more time, to get her terrified patient Dennis to talk to her: When . she walks onto the ward itself-and yet another metal door closes behind her and locks-she sees Dennis sitting on a green vinyl sofa and staring at a television that has not been turned on. He looks up, their eyes meet for a moment, and, to her surprise and relief', he mo tions for her to come and sit down. Then the first miracle happens: Dennis talks. He talks and he talks, and he tells Jackie Rubenstein everything Doreen Littlefield said. And the second miracle is that Jackie believes him. Ftom home that night, she phones Doreen and confronts her. Doreen denies everything, and disdainfully accuses her of being drawn into her patient's paranoia. When Jackie refuses to back down, Doreen Warns her that she will be damaging her own career if she goes to anyone else at the hospital with such a wild tale. When she hangs up the phone after talking with Doreen, Jackie calls a good friend back in Los Angeles for support. She tells him, only half kidding, that she thinks she may be losing her mind. Jackie does not know that Doreen is a fraud, and so from Jackie's perspective , she and Doreen are peers at the hospital. For this rea son, Jackie realizes that she will have a hard time pressing her point with the more senior staff. They will assume this is just some kind of dispute between her and Jackie. At worst, like Doreen, they may -
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suggest she is, letting her patient's isstJes .become her own, . None� theless, on . the following morning she walks. into the office of the director of her unit · and tells him what has happened. His gray be'arded face reddens, which Ja�kie finds ,curiou�, since he does. not seem to be afigxy, either at her or !it Doreen. She wonders, as she has wondered vaguely before, whether he and Doreen have had an affair. · : After he hears Jackie out, the director does not take quite the disdainful approach Doreen did ofi the phone, but he does respect fully remind Jackie, €If how easy it is to see elellients . of credibility in the delusions ,of in.telligent paranoids. He says he very much doubts that anything Den,nis told her actually happened, and he expresses , the hope that she and � Doreen.will not carry this disagreement out �ndefinitely. Such a rift would . be bad for the unit. And so, in all im ;p,ortant respects, poreen gets away with what she has done, as uS\lal. :rhe happier news is that Dennis's therapy with Jackie is not pe.rma nently disrupted, and he is soon discharged from the hospital. The end of Doreen Littlefield's ch�rade eventually comes, as .it so . " J,l, often does for co.;retous sociopaths, not with � ;bang but a whimper, .ahd ipstigated by someone ovtside of the system. In Doreen's �ase, the successful whistle-plower is a consumer advocate who appears twice a month on a local television ,show called Buyer Bewa,,�. Six ¥ears after Doreen's psychological assault on Denni's , this local c�lebrity's , wife is hospitalized for depression, and, completely by �hance, Doreen is assigned as her therapist. Rankled be'cause he be,.� . lie:ves his wi(e's therapy is somehow_fI:luc.�JI]KYP his marriage, ,he :,, ;' uses his expertiseto investigate Dr. Littlefield, and readily dis'1overs what �he is-or rather, what she is not. He at once approaches the business director of the hospital and ef{plains that if the h05pltal will . :r't: �icJ(' Doreen out' immediately, find a new therapist for his Wife, and forgiv;e his wife's entire hospital bill, he will not expose Doreen and . \ fl?e hospit<\l on television. He points out quite reasonably that forgivi�g one bill is a lot less expensive ,t han paying back the hundred� ,
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of bills, or worse, that will be brought against the hospital should Doreen's credentials, or the lack thereof, be broadcasted. Reading the file he is shown, the business director is clear on the concept right away, and on her fortieth birthday, in the middle of eating cake at a little office party organized by Ivy, Doreen is abruptly summoned to the administration building. In the business d�rector� �ffice, the business director, the medical director, and the . dir ctor of �ursing (who wants to be present just because she hates � Doreen so much) inform Doreen that security will escort her to her car, and then monitor her to make certain she leaves the hospital ' . grounds. . Doreen tells the three directors that they are making a big mistake, that the consumer advocate is lying because he does not like her, and that she will sue them. She drives away, and though she was there for fourteen years, no one at the hospital ever hears from her again. The hospital adminis tration does not pursue the matter, for the obvious reasons of public . . embarrassment and medical liability, and there is a collective sigh of . relief when she simply vanishes. In their private qmversations about her, the director of nursing and Jackie Rubenstein speculate that Doreen is somewhere else, in some other state, still practicing psy chology. Most of the people at the hospital have vast quantities of con science, and so why, when they finally find out about Doreen, do they let her go without a fight, most likely to strike again somewhere �lse? And why, in a psychiatric hospital, �as she so hard to see in the tirst place? In general, how can any of us live, as we all do, amo�g �N.'i ;)1)o;J.llll'-c1J.lL numbers of destructive liars and con artists and fail to confront them, or even notice them? As we are about to see, there answers to these crucial questions, and also ways we can begin · to change our responses to the slippery phenomenon of sociopathy. .
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why conS C lence � s p a rt i a l ly b l ind
It is easy-terribly easy-to shake a mans faith in himself To take advantage of that to break a mans spirit is devil s work. - G e o rge B ernard Shaw
f she had thought she could get away with it, Doreen Littlefiel,d BMW, rather : than- merely sabotaging her work. And-more amazing still-if s� had .,crushed or killed Jackie, or anyone else, Doreen would h�ve e?c-' p'erienced no guilt or remorse, p;1uch less the horror most of us would feel if we t;!nded another person\ Hfe. Her blood pressure would not have risen one point, at least not from any negative emotion having , to do with the victim. Doreen has no such sense of things, no sev enth sense of human connectedness to make her feel sick over the consequences of her actions. For most of us, killing �omeone would result in shock, followed by life-altering anguish, even if we had not liked that person. For Doreen, such an act, provided she was never caught, , would be experienced as winning. This difference betw�en normal emotional functioning and Ilociopathy is almost too fantastic for those of us with conscience to grasp, and s9I ��_t.h.�. �?�!. p�r.!.L.:y'e refuse to believe such a hollowness of emotion can exist. And unfor-
I would have run Jackie Rubenstein down with her
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tunately, our difficulty in crediting the magnitude of this di�fere�ce ' \.' �; us in peril. ,I Even without murdering anyone with her car, or her own two hands, Doreen causes untold damage to the people around her. In fact, diminishing other lives is her primary goal. Since she uses the authority trappings of an inpatient psychotherapist, one day, as a , side effect of the vengeful campaigns she conducts, she may push a .patient into suicide, if she has not done so already. And yet for four teen years, a large group of good people, the members of an entire psychiatric hospital staff who would spend their last ounce of strength attempting to prevent a patient's suicide, are blind to what she is, and �hen they discover her deception, they do not try to steip . her. They simply watch her drive away. Why are conscience-bound human beings so blind? And why are they so hesitant to defend themselves, and the ideals and people they care about, from the minority of human beings who possess no conscience at all? A large part of the answer has to do with the emo, tions and thought processes that occur in us when we are confronted with sociopathy. We are afraid, and our sense of reality suffers. We think we are imaii�ing tl:J.ing�, .or ��agge�ati;;g, or that we oursel��-;-are somehow responsible for the sociopath's behavior. But before we discuss in detail our own psychological reactions to shamelessness, , " allow me to put these reactions in context by clearly describing what we are up against. Let us first take a careful look at the formidable techniques used by the shameless to keep us in line. t
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The Tools of the Trade
The first such technique is charm, and as a social force, charm should not be underestimated. Doreen,could be extremely charming when it suited her pur poses. Our old friend Skip used his considerable charm to influence -
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his business associates and to grease the fast: track to corporate dom inance, � chat;n .!h9.�,.gDJ:h��J��* tpay seem �O�!!!e.ri�!.l!,�!�ve�is , _ a.,.E,�i;!Jli!'1�s.h�.re );'. tf e�i�Is.!?L12Si2.E�� The intense charm of p'��ple who have no conscience, a kind of inexplicable charisma, has been observed and commented on by countless victims, and " by re searchers who attempt to catalog the diagnostic signs of sociopathy. It is a potent characteristic, Most of the victims 1 have known in my work have reported that their initial involvement with a sociopathic person, and their continued association even though she or he caused them pain, was a direct result of how charming she or he could be, Countless times, I have watched people shake their heads arid make statements such as, "He was the most charming peI'sdD 1 ever met," or "I felt like I'd known her forever," or "He had an energy about him that other people just don't have. " 1 liken sociopathic charm to the animal charisma of other mam mals who are predators. We watch the large cats, for example, and are fascinated with their movements, their independence, and their power. But the direct gaze of a leopard, should one happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, is inescapable and tetanizing, and the fascinating charm of the predator is often the last thing the prey ever experiences. (I speak of noble leopards, but 1 have,heard abused and enraged victims use metaphors that were decidedly rep-: tilian. ) , Enhancing the animal charisma of sociopaths, the�9ur o� mild affinity for danger. Conventional wisdom has it that dangerous. people are attractive, and when we are drawn to sociopatns: wetend �---------to prove out this ' cliche. Sociopaths are dangerous in many ways. One of the most conspicuous is their preference for risky situations arid choices, and tl;1eir ability to convince oth�-to 't�k�"rfSks aiOt;,g �t h th�;;;'�� ���;� io�--b�t o�iY·��-���7i�;�·"-;:��;r; ; �;;pl -;�� ' -joy minor risks and thrills. We will get out our wallets and. pay for a ride on a monster roller' coaster we cannot imagine survifing, or for a seat in a movie theater showing a bloody thriller we are certain will -
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give us bad dreams. Our normal affinity for the occasional thrill can make the risk-taking sociopath seem all the more charming-at first. Initially, it can be exciting to be invited into the risky scheme, to be associated with the person who is making choices outside of our or dinary boundaries. Let us take your credit card and fly to Paris tonight. Let us take "'�"'-"'--''''' your savings and start that business .that sounds so foolish but, with two��ind; lik-; ��:-�'��--;Hytake"off:-C�t'�-g;-d;� � the . b':ach-;;d;"���;-Le - t u� get;"arried right now. Let us lose these boring friends of yours and go off somewhere by our selves. Let us have sex in the elevator. Let us invest your money in this hot tip I just got. Let us laugh at the rules. Let us walk into this restaurant dressed in our T-shirts and jeans. Let us see how fast your . ..... car can go. Let us live . a little. ---suclllS' th�·fl��;;-�·;t�:�iopathic "spontaneity" and risk taking and "charm," and though we may chuckle about the obvious come ons when we read them, the overall approach has met with note worthy success time and�garn�"" S'omeon� ";h� ' is'''G'�f�t1;�'';�'d'' by ��te'nce'ca��sj]yffiake""Jeel that our lives are tediously rule. bound and lackluster, and that we should join him in what is typically represented as a more meaningful or exhilarating form of existence. Beginning with Eve and the serpent, our history books and our clas sic fiction are filled with tales of people who have been taken in and . sometimes destroyed by the slick talk and magnetism of risk takers and evildoers-Dickie Greenleaf and the talented Mr. Ripley, Samson and Delilah, River City and Harold Hill, Trilby and Svengali, Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott, Empress Alexandra and the seemingly immortal Rasputin. And from our own lives, we have memories of brushes with such people that send little cold chills up our spines. That is, if we are lucky we have had only brushes. The un fortunate must live with the indelible memories of outright personal catastrophes that occurred when they fell victim to the charm of the shameless. .-.. .....--« ,,�
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Moreover, the shameless know us much better than we know ; the�.W��"�;rt;:; d;TYh� ti;;;�' 7;i;;g-jI��t";; p-;;��h�' '- �;;;�ie"; ' c e, but a person who has no conscience can instantly rec ognize someone who is decent and trusting. Even as a child, Skip knew which boy he could talk into acquiring his fireworks for him. & an adult, he immediately perceived that Juliette could live with him for decades and never. question his florid activities. Doreen Littlefield saw an easy mark in Ivy, the receptionist, and understood perfectly well that Jackie Rubenstein was a caring person who <;:ould be counted on to assume more than her fair share of responsibility. When a sociopath identifies someone as a good game piece, she . studies that-pe-r;�;.-Sh�-��ke-;it he;bus�t�;w ho�-that per� ' 1'Oii'Zan be��ip�lated and used, and, to this end, just ho; h� r chosen pawn can be flattered and charmed. In addition, she knows how to promote a ��';-;;'rf�;;ili�'riti� � intimacy by claiming that she and h�; victtm-are -srmila�'-'in -���;ay.�-Victims often recall state ments that affected them even after the sociopath was gone, such as, "You know, I think you and I are a lot alike,," or "It's so deat to me that you're my soul mate." In retrospect, these remarks can feel supremely demeaning. Outrageously untrue, they haunt the mind nonetheless. Relatedly, people without conscience have an uncanny sense of who will be vulnerable to a sexual overture, and seduction is another very common sociopathic technique. For most people, a s�xual liai son involves an emotional tie; even if only fleetingly, and such ties are used by the coldly remorseless to get what they want-alle giance, financial support, information, a sense of "winning," or per haps just a temporary relationship that has the appearance of being normal. This is an easily recognized story, and another one that re peats itself often in our literature and history. But seldom do we rec ognize the degree of power it bestows on sociopaths, power over individuals, bf course, and also over groups of people, and institu tions. A sociopath who is hiding out in an organization can have his ,""rv_"'� "''''
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, . or her tracks hidden indefinitely by 'just one or two normal individu als who have made the single mistake of consummating their attrac tion to this charmingly dangerous person. Doreen, for example, was able to pose as a psychologist primarily because letters of reference were written by two people she had manipulated sexually. And when Jackie tried to expose Doreen's sociopathic behavior, a third person, the unit director, ran interference' probably for the saine reason, and . the seductive "Dr." Littlefield remained at the hospital for six addi I tional years. , And sexual seduction is only one aspect of the game. We are.. se� ' duced as well by the acting skills of " th.� ?���� ince the scaf. . "! . . ng�'oralife'�'W1fhou r*'conSci�;c;"is deception and illusion, ',"'1Orar intelligent sociopaths often become proficient at acting, and even at some of the particular techniques employed by professional actors. Paradoxically, the visible signs of emotion at will can become second nature to the cold-blooded-the appearance of intense interest in another person's problems or enthusiasms, 'chest-thumping patri otism, righteous indignation, blushing modesty, weepy sadness. Crocodile tears at will are a sociopathic trademark. Making Sure that Ivy would see and be psychologically seduced by them, Doreen cried crocodile tears over her patient Dennis, and no doubt she cried them in front of Ivy again, profusely, when she inevitably made up the ter rible, painful illness that "forced" her to have her little dog put to sleep. Crocodile tears from the remorseless are especially likely when a conscience-bound person. gets a little too close to confronting a so ciopath with the truth. A sociopath who is about to be cornered by another person will turn suddenly into a piteous weeping figure whom no one, in good conscience, could continue to pressure. Or the opposite: Sometimes a cornered s()ciopath will adopt a posture of righteous indignation and anger in an. attempt to scare off her ac, cuser, as Doreen did with the hospital directors when she was fin.ally fired. -"
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; B�ing n,atural actors, conscienceless people can make full use of social and Profesllional toles. which constitute excellent ready-made masks that other people are loath to look behiQd. ,Roles help us ,or ganize .our ,complex society, and they are tremendously important to us. If we see suspicious behavior, We may , eventually question some Ol�e named poreen Littlefield, but we are quite unlikely to question someone called Dr. Doreen Littlefield, no matter how unusual her behavior. We relate to the title of doctoT, )Vhich,holds a clear and pos itive meaning for , us, aod we do not think too hard about the human being who calls,herself that., To some extent; the same is true for peopl� who h�ve (legally or illegally) ass,umed roles and titles in the al'enas oOeadership, business, organized religion, education, or par enthQ�d . • Seldom do the neighbors ,scrutinize the behavior of the c�urch de!lcon or the to)Vfi selectman or the high school principal or " a business prodigy like Skip. We believe promises from such people because we assign to the indi;id;;�rth:iri.t�iii·�m 'i:WI��Tr1n-'-" " "" : . e as ion, we almost never challeni�eighb�r's parentin�:� ' tices, e.ven when we fear that a child is being, !lbused, and .often our logic is n0 more substantial than "He's the parent." In addition, we are di�tracted from a person's actual behavior when he represents himself as in some way benevolent, creative, or inSightful. We do not suspect people who claim to be animal lovers, for /example. We give extra leeway to those who identify themselves as artists or intellectuals, in part because we attribute any departures from 'the norm to eccentricities . we, as ordinary , people, could not possibLy understand . In general,. Qurregard fat &uch groups is a con, �tructive sentiment, but it does sometirpes open the door for so. fi 'I dopaths who can mimic the others. Worse, our respect for , peQple .who appear to be iIll!pired and . )¢nevolent lea
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individual accordingly. Benjamin Wolman, founder and editor of the
"'-I nternationaL Journdrof Group Tensions, writes, "Usually human cru
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elty increases when an aggressive sociopath gains an uncanny, al most hypnotic control over large numbers of people. History is full of chieftains, prophets, saviors, gurus, dictators, and other socio pathic megalomaniacs who managed to obtain support . . . and in cited people to violence." Insidiously, when such a "savior" abducts �he normal population to his purposes, he usually begins with an ap peal to them as good people who would like to improve the condi tion of humanity, and then insists that they can achieve this by following his own aggressive plan. In a confusing irony, conscience can be, rendered partially blind because people without conscience use, as weapons against us, many of the fundamentally positive tools we need to hold society to , gether-empathic emotions, sexual bonds, social and professional roles, regard for the compassionate and the creative, our desire to make the world a better place, and the organizing rule of authority. And people who do hideous things do not look like people who do hideous , things. There is no "face of evil." If we could somehow sub tract all its horrifying connotations, the actual face of Saddam Hussein looks rather avuncular, and has often been recorded as hav ing a big friendly smile. Hitler's face, had it not become an icon of evil because of the atrocities his life engendered, might be consid ' ered almost comical, Ch�l?linesque as it were, in its foolish expres sion. Lizzy Borden looked like' all the other laced-up Victorian ladies , in Fall River, Massachusetts. Pamela-Smart is pretty. Ted Bundy was so handsome that women sent marriage proposals to him on death . row, and for every leering Charles Manson, there is the radiantly in nocent countenance of a John Lee Malvo. We try, consciously or tacitly, to judge a person's character by his or her appearance, but this book-by-its-cover strategy is ineffective in nearly all caseS. In the real world, the bad guys do not look the way they are supposed to. They do not resemble werewolves or Hannibal -
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L�chter or Tony Perkins staring at a corpse in a rocking chair. On the contrary, they look like us. Gaslight Being targeted by a sociopath is a very frightening experience, even when that sociopath is not of the violent variety. In 1944, George Cukor directed a psychological thriller entitled Gaslight, in which a beautiful young woman, played by Ingrid Bergman, is made to feel she is going insane. Her fear that she is losing her mind is inflicted on her systematically by Charles Boyer, who plays her evil but charming new husband. Among a number of other dirty tricks, Boyer arranges for Bergman to hear sounds in the attic when he is absent, and for the gaslight to dim by itself, in a menacing house where her aunt was mysteriously murdered years before. Of course, no one believes Bergman about the noises in the attic or the gaslight or much of anything else, and her graduql,.. descent into doubting her own reality has found . its way into English idiom as "to be gaslighted." Boyer is not violent. He;: never strikes Bergman. Much more sinister-he causes her to lose faith in her own perceptjons. To suspect, and to try to explain to others that one has been tar geted by a sociopath, is to be gaslighted. Jackie Rubenstein was a good example of this phenomenon when she confronted Doreen Littlefield with the cruelty she had done to Dennis. Mterwarc;l , Jackie phoned a friend for support because she felt she was losing her mind. And when she tried to relate her discovery about Doreen' to the unit director, he politely but clearly echoed Doreen's implica tion that Jackie had gone a little crazy along with her paranoid pa tient. When Jackie accused Doreen of a vicious act toward an unof fending patient, the natural question was, Why would a person like that do such a horrible thing? This is the question others always ask, -
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overtly or by intimation, and it is such a bewildering, unanswerable ql:1estion that the one who suspects the sociopath usually ends up ��king it, too, only to find that she has no rational-sounding expla nation. And like the innocent new bride in Gaslight, she may come to , ,lose faith, partially or completely, in her own perceptions. Certainly �he will hesitate to tell her story again, since trying to expose the so G I , �iopath casts d�ubts on her own credibility and maybe even on her :��nity, These doubts, our own and other people's, are painful, and \ �eadily convince us to keep our mouths shut, Over the years, listen ,I ing to hundreds of patients who have been targeted by sociopaths, I have learned that within an organization or a community, in the . event that a sociopath is finally revealed to all and sundry, it is not unusual to find that several people suspected all along, each one in dependently, each one in silence. Each one felt gaslighted, and so e.' ach one kept her crazy�sounding secret to herself. Why would a person like that do such a horrible thing? we ask 'I ourselves. By "a person like that," we mean a normal-looking person, a person who .looks just like us,. We mean a person in a professional role, or an animal lover, or a parent or a spouse, or maybe a charm ing someone we have had dinner, or more, with. And by "such a hor I rible thing," we mean a negative act that is inexplicably bizarre, , because there is no way, based on our own feelings ard normal mo tivations, that we can explain why anyone would ever want to do it in the first place. Why would a smart, handsome, privileged boy like . Skip want to slaughter small animals? In adulthood, why would fab ulously successful Skip, married to the beautiful daughter of a bil lionaire, risk his reputation by--hreaking the arm of an �mployee? Why would Dr. Littlefield, a psychologist and the nicest person in " the world, suddenly mount a brutal psychological attack on a recov ering patient, and a VIP at that? Why would she, an established professional person, knowing she would be found out, make up a meaningless whole-cloth lie just to scare a young intern? These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves when we are \
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expo,sed to sociopathic behavior, and in' most cases, we cannot come up With answers, that sound plausible to ' us. Speculate as we may, , we �ann()t imagine why. Nothing sounds believable, so w; think there m:U:�f bea mlsu�derstanding; �r maybe ..we , have greatly exag� " geratea something in our observations. We think this way becau�e the ' conscienc-e"bound mind is qu�litatively different from the conscience-free mind, and what sociopaths want, what motivates them, is comple�elY outsicie our"expeiience. In order to h,frtn'a"tnen 'tallY nf pe'rson' [ri�entionaUy, �s Doreen did', or to bre,ak someone's arm, as Skip did" most of u� would have to be seriously threatened by the person we were hurting, or be under the influence of a com pelling emotion such as rage. Performing such actions calmly, for fun, has no place in the emotional repertoire of normal people. Sociopaths, people with no intervening sense of obligation based in attachments to others, typically devote their lives to interpersog.,al games, to "winning," to dominati� for the sake of domination. The rest of us, who do possess conscience, may ,be able to understand this motivational scheme conceptually, but :when we see it in real life, its contours are so alien that we often fail to "see" it at all. Man:r l?eo ple without conscience will behave self-destructively simply for the I purposes of the' game. Stamp Man spent half his life in jail ,for the<': 'thriIl, every fewyears: of making a few , postal workers and police of ficers scurry around for an hour or so. Doreen gleefully put her own career at significant risk just to damage her colleague's a little. These al'e. behaviors we are not prepared to understand, or even believe:'" I '''' \' We will doubt our own sense of realitY first. , : " kd"ofteq,':Z;ur 'self-doubt; are ' extreme: As' an illustration, there . was, the remaikable pub.Hc reaction, which continued for thirty years ... �fter her death, to a , career criminal named Barbara Graham. In 1955, at the age of thirty-two, Graham was executed at San Quentin ' for her part in the especially brutal 'murder of an elderly widow named Mabel Monahan. Mrs. Monahan, like Ingrid Bergman's mur'"
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/.dered aunt in Gaslight, had been rumored to keep a cache of jewels r in her house. Graham and three accomplices entered the house, and ' ;'heh no jewels were forthcoming, Graham (nicknamed "Bloody Babs" by the media) pistol-whipped the elderly woman, nearly oblit� , erating her face, and then suffocated her to death with a pillow. I, Recorded at her execution, Bloody Babs's last words were, . "Good people are always so sure they're right." This assertion was delivered calmly, almost with an air of sympathy, and as an effective 'gaslighting technique, it was a fairly good line. It caused many to doubt their own sense of reality concerning Graham, and refocused the public's attention on her role as an attractive mother of three . ' young children, rather than on her grisly behavior. After her death, she became the subject of emotional debate, and even today, against . " . the weight of considerable evidence, there are tho;e who maintain <, ' that Graham was innocent. Out of the public's self-doubt sprang two films about her, both entitled I Want to Live! The first starred Susan Hayward, who won an Oscar for her performance, and a 1983 tele vision remake featured Lindsay Wagner. In both versions, Graham, the sadistic murderess, was portrayed as a poignantly misunderstood woman who was framed. Barbara Graham's last words-"'C?od people are always so sure they're right"-had a gaslighting effect precisely because the truth is quite the opposite. In fact, one of the more s�rikil}g cha.{Flctel,'jgics of good people is that they are almost never completely sure they are right. Good people question themsel,::�s constantlY, r�&;'�ively, . and subject their decisions and actions to the exaCting scrutiny o( art in- . t��ening sense of obligation rooted in their 'attac4m�nts to other� people. The self-questioning of conscience seld�m ad�its ilbsol�te certainty into the mind, and even when it does, certainty feels treacherous to us, as if it may trick us into punishing someone un- ' justly, or performing some other unconscionable act. Even legally, we speak of "b,eyond a reasonable doubt" rather than of complete cer. .
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tainty. I n the end, Barbara Graham understood us far better than we understood her, and her parting remark pushed an irrational but very J sensitive psychological button in the conscience-bound people who survived her-the fear that they had made a decision Qased on too much certainty.
Adding to our insecurity, most of us comprehend instinctively that there are shades of good and bad, rather than absolute cate gories. We know in our hearts there is no such thing as a person who is 100 percent good, and so we assume there must be no stich thing as a person who is 100 percent bad. And perhaps philosophically and . certainly theologically-this is true. After all, in the Judeo Christian tradition, the devil himself is a fallen angel. Probably there are no absolutely good human beings and no utterly bad ones. However-psychologically speaking, there definitely ar� people who possess an intervening sense of constraint based in emotional at tachments, and other people who have no such sense. And to fail to understand this is to place people of conscience, and all the Mabel Monahans of the world, in danger. How Do We
Keep the Blinders
Off?
My daughter's fifth-grade class had a field trip, and I was one of the chaperones. We went to see a play called Freedom Train, about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. On the noisy bus . ride back to school, one of the boys was picking on another boy, pok ing him and pulling his hair. The quiet boy being poked was devel opmentally delayed, friendless, I am told, and did not have a clue how to defend himself. Even before one of the adults could inter vene, a petite girl seated just behind the two boys tapped the tor mentor on the shoulder and said, "That's really mean. Quit it." The person who recognized"tfiis antisocial '15efiavlOr and publicly
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objected te it was ten years .old and all .of four feet tall. The boy she had spoken to stuck his tongue out' at her and leapt over to anether bus seat to be with one .of his pals. She watched him go and then calmly resumed the game of rock-paper-scissors she had been play ing with the girl next to her. What happens to us while we are grewing up? Why de adults stop saying "Quit it" to the bullies? The' grewn-up bullies are more pow erful, but then, se are we. Will this healthy little girl behave with the same kind .of dignity and self�assurance when she is thirty years old and a fept and a half taller? Will she be anether Harriet Tubman, al beit with a different cause? Sadly, given our present child-rearing practices, the .odds are against it. We raise our children, especially girls, te ignere their sponta neous reactions-we teach them not to reck the soc(etal boat-and this is a goed and necessary lesson when the spontaneous reaction involved would be to strike .out violently with fists or werds, or to steal an attractive item from a store, or to insult a stranger in' a su permarket line. But another kind of spontaneous reaction, equally suppressed by our cenflict-avOidant society, is theIrTCk!" reactlOn, the 'nafli;aTsense 0 mOra1oUtfage. By'the ti;-;sh� i;'tliTity,lIlivaliant ' 'Iitif;-girfS'"ICkT"--=I1ertendency to respond, to rock the boat, when someone's actions are "really mean"-may have been excised from her behavier, and perhaps from her very mind. In their book Womens Anger: Clinical and Developmenta l Perspectives, gender psychologists Deborah Cox, Sally Stabb,' and Karin Bruckner document the ways girls and women perceive social respoqses to their outrage. Cox, Stabb, and Bruckner write t hat "the . . majerity of interactions they [girls and women] describe involve re jection of either the anger, the girl .or weman, .or beth. This takes the fOrnl of either direct attack through criticism .or defensive response, or more passive rejection such as withdrawal and minimizatien of the girl's or weman's concerns and feelings." And based en her stud.
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ies of adolescent girls, educator Lyn Mikel Brown maintains that ide alized femininity can dangerously endorse "silence over outspoken ness." To keep the blinders off our life-enhancing seventh sense, as with most improvements in the human condition, we must start with our children. A part of healthy conscience is being able to confront con sciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by pas\ sive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must, be lkind and accepting; to the point of not defending hers,elf or other ' people, th�t sh� must not , rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense; you are damaging �t----:-and the first person she will stop protecting is herself. Cox, Stabb, and Bruckner argue emphatically that "the requirement to suppress outrage at the other robs the woman of an opportunity to develop this kind of au tonomy." Instead, as Lyn Mikel Brown has said, we need to suggest "the possibility, even under the most oppressive conditions, for cre-, \ ative refusal and resistance." Do not set her up to , be gaslighted. 'When she observes that someone who is being really mean is being really mean, tell her she is right and that it is okay to say so out loud. Jackie Rubenstein chose to believe her patient Dennis, and not to believe her dangerous col league Doreen Littlefield. It was a good, moral choice. She said, ef, fectively, "That's really mean. Quit it," though saying so out loud caused her to be viewed as a troublemaker by many of the less in sightful people around her. As for the boys-in Raising Cain: Protecting , the Emotional Life of Boys, leadi)1g child psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michaet " , Thompson record their concern about the frequency with which ,"vulnerable fathers turn to time-honored defensive responses to maintain the fictipn tl��t ,:father knows best.' " Parents, especially fa the;s �;-typiCally tk ach their sons to obey authority no matter what, and . given the wrong cultural and political circumstances, circum, stances that have occurred with morbid regularity throughout his\
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tory; this is a l�sson that may well come with a suicide clause. That parents wish to foster a certain respect for legitimate authodty is understartdable, and probably important for the functioning of society I as we know it. But to drill children in reflexive, no-questions-asked obedience is to beat ,a horse that is more than half-dead already. Obedience to apparent authority is a knee-jerk reaction in most peo ple quite without training, and to sensitize this reflex is to make our . children hypervulnerable to any aggressive or sociopathic "authority" I . who may come along later in their lives. �, To everyone's detriment, obedience and the higher values of patriotism and duty can become indistinguishable motivatioJ:?s. ' Enhanced in this way, reflexive obedience can consume the individ� fial before he even has a chance to wonder whether he himself might be the best authority when it comes to his own life and his own , country, and long before, he can ask questions such as "Do I and my " countrymen really want to fight and perhaps die for this external 'au thority's' self-interest?" Still, I believe we may now be standing at the edge of a modern , possibility ' thousands of years in the making. In the past, for stark, . , reasons of survival, human beings truly needed their children Qot to . , : ' �pset any hard-won applecarts, not to question things too much, not I ' to disobey orders. Life was physically hard and precarious, and chil i 'dren who challenged our authority might all too easily end up as " �ead children. And so, until recent centurie� , w� raised humans 'for .' whom moral outrage was an extreme luxury, and to whom the ques 'ILllJ'Ull.l� of authority felt life-threatening. In this way, generation after �eneration, we were unwittingly set up for sociopathic takeovers. , But now, for most of us in the developed world, surVival conditions . no longer hold. We can stop. We can let our children question things. And when they are grown, they can;-'without -sloubting their own :s.. , �.nses, look the grown-up b�.....llies in the eye a'nd say, ' "That's, - r�ally . ,,' ,lll<: l dll. Quit ,it.',' what about those of us who are already grown, we who have I,"
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had decades of practice in ignoring our own instincts? How can we avoid being gaslighted, and allow ourselves to recognize the people around us who have no conscience? This is the concern addressed in the next chapter. It is an interesting question with a rather surpris ing answer.
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how to r e cogm z e the r e mors e l e s s
In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable. -Loren Eiseley
n my practice, one of the questions I am asked most often is, "How can I terll whom to trust?" Since my patients are survivors of psychological trauma, most of whom have been devastated by other , human beings, this is not a surprising concern for them to have. On the other hand, my feeling is that this issue is a pressing one for most of us, even those who have not endured severe trauma, and that we '. all try very hard to assess the level of conscience that exists, or not, in other people. We are especially interested in the conscience qUO . tient of the people we have close relationships with, and when w� , meet an attractive new person, we often invest considerable mental energy in suspiciousness over, guesses about, and wishful thinking concerning this question. The untrustworthy do not wear special shirts, or marks on their foreheads, and the fact that we must often make crucial decisions " about other people based on not much more th�m guesswork leads us to irrational strategies that readily become lifelong superstitions.
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"Don't trust anyone over thirty," "Never trust a man," "Never trust a woman," "Never trust anyone" are the most popular examples. We want a clear rule, even a sweeping one, because knowing whom to be wary of is so important to us, but these wide-brush strategies are ineffective, and, worse, they tend to produce anxiety and unhappi ness in our lives. Apart from knowing someone well for many years, there is no foolproof decision rule or litmus test for trustworthiness, and it is ex tremely important to acknowledge this fact, unnerving though it may be. Uncertainty in this regard is simply a part of the human condi tion, and I have never known anyone who got around it completely, except by the most extraordinary luck. Furthermore, to imagine there is an effective method-a method that one has thus far been unable to figure out-is to beat up on oneself in a way that is de meaning and unfair. When it comes to trusting other people, we all make mistakes . . Some of these mistakes are larger than others. Having said this, when people ask me about trust, I reply that there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that there truly are indiviquals who have no conscience, and these individuals are not to be trusted at all. Perhaps an average offour people in ,a ran dom group of one hundred are limited in this way. The good news the very good news-is that at least ninety-six people out of a hundred are bound by the constraints of conscience, and can there fore be counted on to behave according to a . reasonably high base line of decency and responsibility-to behave, in other words, more or less as well as you and I do. And to my mind, this second fact is a great deal more compelling than the first. It means, astonishingly, that to a certain standard of prosocial behavior, our interpersonal world should be about ninety-six percent safe. And so why does the world seem to be so terribly unsafe? How do we explain the six o'clock news, or even our own personal bad ex periences? What is going on here? Could it conceivably be that a -
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mere 4 percent of the popula�ion is responsible for nearly all of the . human disasters that occur in the world, and in our individual lives? This is an arresting question, one that offers to overhaul many of our assumptions about human society. So I will repeat that the phe .t;lQmenon of conscience is overwhelmingly powerful, persistent, and . . prosocial. Unless under the spell of a psy�hotic delusion, extreme ,rage, inescapable deprivation, drugs, or a destructive authority fig ure, a person who is conscience-bound does not-in some sense he cannot-kill. or ' rape . in cold blood, torture another p�rson, steal . someone's life savings, trick someone into a loveless relationship as sport, . or willfully abandon his own child. Could you? When we see people doing such things, either in the news or in , our own lives, who are they? On the rare occasion, they are formally , insane, or under the pressure of some radical emotion. Sometimes , they are members of a group that is desperately deprived, or they are , substance abusers, or the followers of a malevolent leader. But most often they are none of these. Rather, most often, they are people who have no conscience. They are sociopaths. Certainly the very worst of the unthinkable deeds we read about , in our newspapers and tacitly ascribe to "human nature"-though the events shock us as normal human beings-are not reflective of . normal human nature at all, and we insult and demoralize ourselves when we assume so. Mainstream human nature, though far from perfect, is very much governed by a disciplining sense of intercon nectedness, and the genuine horrors we see on television, and some , times endure in our personal lives, do not reflect typical humankind. In-stead, they are made possible by something quite alien to our na , ture�the c.old and complete absence of conscience. This is, I think, somewhat difficult for many people to accept. We h�ve 'a hard time acknowledging that particular individuals are shameless by their nature, and the. rest of us. not so, due in part to nature. Shadow theI refer to as the "shadow theory" of
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ory�the simple and probably accurate notion that we all have a "shadow side" not necessarily apparent from our usual behavior maintains in its most extreme form that anything doable or feelable by one human being is potentially doable or feelable by all. In other words, under certain circumstances (though they are circumstances we are hard-pressed to imagine) anyone at all could be, for example, a death-camp commandant. Ironically, good and kindheart�d people are often the most willing to subscribe to this theory in the radical form that proposes -they could, in some bizarre situation, be mass murderers_ It feels more democratic and less condemnatory (and somehow less alarming) to believe that everyone is a little shady than to accept that a few human beings. live in a permanent and ,absolu!.: .. . moral nighttime. To admit that some J;>eople literally have no con ' science is not technically the same as saying that some human be ings are evil, but it is disturbi�gly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil. Of course, though not everyone could be' a death-camp com mandant, many if not most people are capable of overlooking the horrific activities of such a person, owing to the viscosity of psycho 'logical denial, moral exclusion, and blind obedience to authority. Asked aboutrour sense that we are not safe in our own world, Albert Einstein once said, "The world is a dangerous place to 'live, not be cause of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." To do something about shameless people, we must first identify them. So; in our individual lives, how do we recognize the one per� son out of (more or less) twenty-five who has no conscience and who is potentially dangerous to our resources and our )Yell-being? Deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy usually requires kriowing that person well for a long time, and in the case of identi fying a sociopath, much better and longer than one would have al lowed had the sociopaJ;h been wearing a mark on his forehead at the outset. This harrowing dilemma is simply a part of the human con-
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dition. But even given the familiarity requirement, the pressing ques I tion remains, "How can I teU whom to trust?"-or more to the point; , whom not to trust. After listening for almost twenty-five years to the stories my pa tie�ts tell me about sociopaths who have invaded and injured their lives, when I am asked, "How can I tell whom not to trust?" the an ' , swer I give usually surprises people. The natural expectation is that I ,will describe SOme sinister-sounding detail ' of behavior or snippet of body language or threatening use of language that is the subtle give away. Instead, I take people aback by assuring them that the tip-off is none of these things, for none of these-things is reliably present. Rather, the best clue is, of all things, fhe pity play. !,pe most reliable "\.. - ' sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at· our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an '- appeal to our sympathy. , , �-r-o -'I first learned thi�' �h;� I was still a graduate student in psychology and had the opportunity to interview a court-referred patient the system had already identified as a "psychopath." He was not violent, preferring instead to swindle people out of their money with elabo- ' " rate investment scams. Intrigued by this individual and what could possibly motivate him-I was young enough to think he was a rare sort of person�1 asked, "What is important to you in your life? What do you want m:ore than anything else?" I thought he might say "get. ting money," or "staying out of jail," which were the activities to which he devoted most of his time. Instead, without a moment's hesitation, he replied, "Oh, that's easy. What I like better than anything , else is when people feel sorry for me. The thing I really want more " _than anythi�g �l�� Qut of life is people's pity." , , I was astonished: 'ir'tCi ,-?bre than a little put ·�ff. I think I would have liked him better if he had said "staying out of jail," or even "get ,ting mbney." Also, I was mystified. Why would this man-why would , anyone-wish to be pitied, let alone wish to be pitied above all other ambitions? I could not imagine. But now, after twenty-five years of ._
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listening to victims, I realize there is an excellent reason for the so ciopathic fondness for pity. As obvious as the nose on one's face, and just as difficult to see without the help of a mirror, the explanation is that good people will let pathetic individuals get by with murder, so to speak, and therefore any sociopath wishing to continue with his game, whatever it happens to be, should play repeatedly for none other than pity. More than admiration-more even than fear-pity from good people is carte blanche. When we pity, we are, at le�st fur the mo ment, def�nseless, '�nd like so many of the other essentially positive human characteristics that bind us together in groups-social and professional roles, sexual bonds, regard for the compassionate and the creative, respect for our leaders---:our emotiol)�Lyulnerability , when we pity is used against us by tho�wh� have no conscience. Most or�'� ;oulc Cag;�� that givi;g spe'a"J dispensati�n to someone who is incapable of feeling guilt is a bad idea, but often, when an in dividual presents himself as pathetic, we do so nonetheless. Pity!:.nd sympathy are forces for good wh�n they are reactions to deserving people who have fallen on misfortune. But when these sen tinientsare wrested out of us by the undeserving, by people whose . -. ""behavior is consistently antisocial, this is a sure sign that. something is wrong, a potentially useful danger signal that we often overi�ok. Perhaps the most easily recognized example is the battered wife whose sociopathic husband beats her routinely and then sits at the kitchen table, head in his hands, moaning that he cannot control himself and that he is a poor wretch whom she must find it in her heart to forgive. There are countless other examples, a seemingly endless variety. some even more flagrant than the violent spouse and some almost subliminal. And for those of us who do have conscience, such situations, no matter how brazen, seem to present us emotion ally wit� a kind of em�edded figure puzzle, in �hich the backgroupd . design (the appeal for pity) continually overcomc:s, our perceptions of the mor� importan{ e-mbedded picttire (the antisocial behavior) . .- . . .. r · . ....
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In long retrospect, sociopathic appeals for pity are preposterous , , and chilling. Skip implied that he deserved sympathy because he had , broken someone's arm. Doreen Littlefield represented herself as a poor' overworked soul who was too sensitiv; to �it;;��s her patients' "pain. From prisori� i dovely and endea�ing Ba�b�ra' Grah�;-' �� " -plained to reporters that society was preventing her from taking ,proper care of her children. And as for the likes of the aforemen tioned death-camp official-in the 1945 interrogations that pre ' ceded the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, testimony from actual death-camp guards included their descriptions of how awful it was : t� be in charge of the crematoriums, on acCl:�up.t of the smell. In in ,, ' terviews 'highlighted by British historian Richard Overy, the guards complained that it was difficult for them to eat their sandwiches' -
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Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but , " , they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry ' .' , , 'for him. ' When d:ciding whoJ? to trust, bear ip mind that the combina tion of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with . frequent plays for you�-pitY is as clos� to a wa!ning mark on a con scienceless person's forehead as you will ever be g�ven. A . person : " whose behavior iricfudes both of th�se features is not necessarily a mass murderer, or even violent at all, but is still probably not some one you should closely' befriend, take on as your business partner, ': ' . ask to take care of your children, Or marry. .
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What about the most precious component of the social contract? What about love? Here ,is one woman's quiet calamity, a story that will never be on the six o'clock news. -
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My patient Sydney was not pretty. At forty-five, she had dirty blond hair that was turning gray and a round motherly body that had never been glamorous. But she owned a fine intellect and a long list of academic and professional accomplishments. At a university in her home state of Florida, she had been promoted to an associate professorship in epidemiology before she was thirty. She studied the population effects of substances used in indigenous medicines, and before her marriage she had traveled extensively in Malaysia, South America, and the Caribbean. When she moved from Florida to Massachusetts, she became a consultant to an ethnopharmacology group based in Cambridge. But I liked her most for her gentle de meanor and the thoughtful, introspective approach she took to her life. One of the things I remember best about her was the soft warmth of her speaking voice during the brief fifteen therapy ses sions we had together. Sydney was divorced from a man named Luke. The divorce had drained her life savings and caused her to go into debt, because she had needed to make sure she got custody of her son, Jonathan, who was eight when I knew Sydney, and only five at the time of the di vorce. Luke had put up an expensive struggle, not because he loved Jonathan, but because he was enraged with Sydney for making him move out of her house. The house in South Florida had a swimming pool. Luke loved the pool. "Luke was living in this shabby little apartment when I met him," Sydney told me. "That should've raised a red flag for me right there, a thirty-five-year-old man who'd gone to graduate school at NYU city planning, actually-living in that awful little place. But I ignored it, He said he really liked the big pool his apartment complex had. So when he saw I had my own pool, he got all happy. What can I tell you? My husband married me for my pool. Well, that's not entirely true, but in retrospect, it was definitely part of it."
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Sydney overlooked Luke's lifestyle, and his attraction to hers, be cause she thought she had found something rare, an extremely .intelligent, attractive thirty-five-year-old man, with no wife and no . ex-wives, whose interests seemed similar to hers, and who treated J'
, her well. "He treated me very well at first, I must say. He took me out. He . ' always brought me flowers. I remember all those birds-of-paradise in , long boxes, all those orange flowers. I had to go out and buy some really tall vases. I don't know. He was soft-spoken and sort of quietly charming-we had great conversations. He was another academic type, like me, or so I thought. Whe� I met him, he was working on , . a planning project through a friend of his at the university. Always , dressed up in suits. Actually, that's where I met him, the university. Nice, upstanding place to meet somebody, wouldn't you say? He
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told me he thought we were a lot alike, and I guess I believed him." -- As the weeks passed, Sydney learned that since Luke had been twenty or so, he had lived with a succession of women, always in their homes, and that having a place of his own, even an inexpensive , �ne, had been an unusual departure from his preferred situation. But she overlooked this information also, because she was falling in love with Luke. And she thought he was in love with her, too, be cause that was what he told her. 'Tm just a frumpy academic. No one had ever been so romantic
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with me. It was a good time;-I should probably confess that. Too
. ' bad it had to be so short. Anyway . . . There I was, this frumpy thirty 'Ii·i",·nvp_�'p::lr_nll1 career type, and all of a sudden I was thinking about a . white wedding, the whole nine yards. I'd never done that before. I \
1p.ean, I always thought it was a silly fairy tale they tell little girls, not
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